Approximation by analytic and harmonic functions, incompressible vector fields, and temperature distributions (Q1270693)

The author is interested in the best (in the \(L_2\) sense) approximations of a given function from \(L_2 (\Omega)\) by solutions of certain partial differential equations. His starting point is an abstract result for the solution of the approximation problem \(Au=0\) and \(\| u-f\|_H\to\min\) in a Hilbert space \(H\), where \(A\) is a linear operator with domain \(D(A)\) acting from \(H\) into another Hilbert space. The author shows that this result allows to reduce the approximation by harmonic functions, by incompressible vector fields and by solutions of the heat equation to the solution of well-posed problems for each class of functions.