The mountain pass alternative (Q1814143)

The paper develops variational methods allowing to find the critical points of a continuously differentiable functional on a real Banach space. A modification of the mountain pass lemma concerning sequences that tend to the studied critical points is given. Two characteristic properties (``the alternatives'') based upon the above-mentioned lemma are used to prove the solvability of the gradient equations. As an application, the nonlinear elliptic boundary value problems are considered.