Symmetrization and stabilization of solutions of nonlinear elliptic equations (Q1667424)

This book takes a dynamical systems approach on elliptic differential equations, which are traditionally treated by variational methods. Inherent difficulties of this approach are due to: \begin{itemize} \item having to work with an infinite-dimensional phase space, \item the phase space may be a non-standard weighted function space, \item often elliptic boundary value problems have multiple solutions. \end{itemize} In order to resolve such difficulties, attention is restricted to specific problems amenable to treatment by symmetry methods. The domains on which the equations are set are at least asymptotically symmetric and have at least one unbounded direction which plays the role of time. That is, are considered domains such as an entire \(\mathbb{R}^n\), half space \((0,\infty) \times \mathbb{R}^{n-1}\), or asymptotically cylinders which at infinity are close to \((0,\infty) \times \Omega\). The book has seven chapters. The first two chapters comprise more than half of the text and discuss some standard topics in functional analysis such as \(L^p\) spaces, weak convergence, compact embeddings and integral inequalities. Also are presented results on boundary value problems for linear elliptic equations, and general methods such as the maximum principle, the sweeping principle, the sliding and moving plane method. Interspersed, the reader will find brief topics which are not really main stream such as for example the Shapiro-Lopatinski condition. The second chapter is mostly about dynamical system concepts and how they extend from finite to infinite dimensions. This is achieved via examples from PDEs. The shorter Chapters 3 through 7 contain examples involving the Laplace and \(p\)-Laplace (Chapter 7) operators. The style of the presentation does not make an easy lecture, but the author does a very good job with the difficult and somewhat unexpected task of pairing together elliptic PDE's with dynamical systems methods specific to finite dimensions.