A new look into the concept of separable system of Classical Mechanics

The theory of integrable systems of Classical Mechanics has been deeply affected, in the second half of the last century, by the discovery of the integrability of the Korteweg–de Vries equation. New ideas appeared at that time (such as, for instance, the concepts of Lax and bihamiltonian representations, and the notions of Poisson manifold, Poisson pencil, and recursion operator) which have changed our way of seeing the geometry of integrable systems. They also changed our way of seeing the geometry of separable systems. The paper is an attempt to explain why and in what form the idea of recursion operator leads to reshape the definition of separable system, and to discover a new set of separability conditions called “Kowalevski separability conditions”.