Life-span of Classical Solutions of Nonlinear Hyperbolic Systems

In this paper, we give a lower bound for the life-span of classical solutions to the Cauchy problem for first order nonlinear hyperbolic systems with small initial data, which is sharp, and give its application to the system of one-dimensional gas dynamics; for the Cauchy problem of the system of one-dimensional gas dynamics with a kind of small oscillatory initial data, we obtain a precise estimate for the life-span of classical solutions.