Techniques of variational analysis (Q2485248)

Variational principles base on the fact that a (continuous) real-valued function which is bounded below must not attain a minimum in general. It is pointed out, however, that there exist small perturbations of this function for which a global minimizer can be ensured. The book presents a nice treatment of known variational principles and their application in many fields of mathematics. In the first part (Chapter 2), various versions of variational principles -- first of all the variational principle of Ekeland and the smooth variational principle of Borwein-Preiss -- are introduced and discussed. The results provide powerful tools in modern analysis. In the larger second part, the authors demonstrate the application of variational techniques in (Fréchet) subdifferential calculus (Chapter 3), in convex analysis (Chapter 4), for the characterization of multifunctions (Chapter 5), for special problems in nonlinear functional analysis (Chapter 6) and for special problems assuming additionally symmetry properties (Chapter 7). Many exercises are provided at the end of all sections where the reader can reflect the main text and can get further generalizations of the results.