Lectures on the Ekeland variational principle with applications and detours. Lectures delivered at the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore, India under the T.I.F.R.-I.I.Sc. programme in applications of mathematics (Q1188561)

This text grew out of lectures by the author. It aims to present a coherent introduction to the field of nonlinear functional analysis connected with Ekeland's variational principle (EVP). Beyond doubt, the author has succeeded fully in this task. The text is nicely written and gives good motivations. In Chapter I, the notion of lower semicontinuity is introduced, followed by a ``detour'' on Nemytskij mappings in Chapter II. Chapter III brings a first treatment of semilinear elliptic equations via variational techniques. A number of classical existence results are presented. In Chapter IV the EVP and its equivalent counterpart, the Caristi fixed point theorem, are proved. A general max-min-principle is proved via the EVP in Chapter 5, from which the mountain pass lemma in its different versions is derived. The following Chapter 6 brings a further treatment of semilinear elliptic equations, now under less restrictive assumptions than in Chapter 2. A number of existence results are established which are based on the investigation under what conditions the Palais-Smale condition can be satisfied. In the subsequent Chapter 7 the EVP is used to prove the Drop theorem which leads to the Bishop-Phelps results on support points and functionals. Chapter 8 brings a detailed discussion of duality mappings and a proof of the Brønsted-Rockafellar result on the density of dom \(\partial \Phi\) in dom \(\Phi\) for convex l.s.c. functions. The concluding Chapter 9 is devoted to normal solvability.