In the few years since their appearance in the mid-sixties, variational inequalities have developed to such an extent and so thoroughly that they may now be considered an "institutional" development of the theory of differential equations (with appreciable feedback as will be shown). This book was written in the light of these considerations both in regard to the choice of topics and to their treatment. In short, roughly speaking my intention was to write a book on second-order elliptic operators, with the first half of the book, as might be expected, dedicated to function spaces and to linear theory whereas the second, nonlinear half would deal with variational inequalities and non variational obstacle problems, rather than, for example, with quasilinear or fully nonlinear equations (with a few exceptions to which I shall return later). This approach has led me to omit any mention of "physical" motivations in the wide sense of the term, in spite of their historical and continuing importance in the development of variational inequalities. I here addressed myself to a potential reader more or less aware of the significant role of variational inequalities in numerous fields of applied mathematics who could use an analytic presentation of the fundamental theory, which would be as general and self-contained as possible.

The primary objective of this monograph is to give a comprehensive exposition of results surrounding the work of the authors concerning boundary regularity of weak solutions of second order elliptic quasilinear equations in divergence form. The book also contains a complete development of regularity of solutions of variational inequalities, including the double obstacle problem, where the obstacles are allowed to be discontinuous. The book concludes with a chapter devoted to the existence theory thus providing the reader with a complete treatment of the subject ranging from regularity of weak solutions to the existence of weak solutions.

The material presented here corresponds to Fermi lectures that I was invited to deliver at the Scuola Normale di Pisa in the spring of 1998. The obstacle problem consists in studying the properties of minimizers of the Dirichlet integral in a domain D of Rn, among all those configurations u with prescribed boundary values and costrained to remain in D above a prescribed obstacle F. In the Hilbert space H1(D) of all those functions with square integrable gradient, we consider the closed convex set K of functions u with fixed boundary value and which are greater than F in D. There is a unique point in K minimizing the Dirichlet integral. That is called the solution to the obstacle problem.

In this Research Note the author brings together the body of known work and presents many recent results relating to nonlinear partial differential equations that give rise to a free boundary--usually the boundary of the set where the solution vanishes identically. The formation of such a boundary depends on an adequate balance between two of the terms of the equation that represent the particular characteristics of the phenomenon under consideration: diffusion, absorption, convection, evolution etc. These balances do not occur in the case of a linear equation or an arbitrary nonlinear equation. Their characterization is studied for several classes of nonlinear equations relating to applications such as chemical reactions, non-Newtonian fluids, flow through porous media and biological populations. In this first volume, the free boundary for nonlinear elliptic equations is discussed. A second volume dealing with parabolic and hyperbolic equations is in preparation.

This book presents a unified approach to studying the stability of both elliptic Cauchy problems and selected inverse problems. Based on elementary Carleman inequalities, it establishes three-ball inequalities, which are the key to deriving logarithmic stability estimates for elliptic Cauchy problems and are also useful in proving stability estimates for certain elliptic inverse problems. The book presents three inverse problems, the first of which consists in determining the surface impedance of an obstacle from the far field pattern. The second problem investigates the detection of corrosion by electric measurement, while the third concerns the determination of an attenuation coefficient from internal data, which is motivated by a problem encountered in biomedical imaging.

Derived from a lecture series for college mathematics students, introduces the methods of dealing with elliptical boundary-value problems--both the theory and the numerical analysis. Includes exercises. Translated and somewhat expanded from the 1987 German version. Annotation copyright by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR