Continuous changes of variables and the Magnus expansion

Abstract: In this paper, we are concerned with a formulation of Magnus and Floquet-Magnus expansions for general nonlinear differential equations. To this aim, we introduce suitable continuous variable transformations generated by operators. As an application of the simple formulas so-obtained, we explicitly compute the first terms of the Floquet-Magnus expansion for the Van der Pol oscillator and the nonlinear Schr\"odinger equation on the torus.