Variational characterization of the speed of propagation of fronts for the nonlinear diffusion equation (Q1912617)

The authors give an integral variational characterization for the speed of fronts of the semilinear diffusion equation \(u_t= u_{xx}+ f(u)\) with \(f(0)= f(1)= 0\) and \(f> 0\) in \((0, 1)\), which enables the exact computation of the speed for arbitrary \(f\).