Curves of descent (Q2810053)

This paper is dedicated to unveiling new facts about the notion of steepest descent, some of which quite surprising. An alternate strategy for constructing near-steepest descent curves is proposed, exploiting a discretization of the range of the involved function and then building a piecewise linear curve by projecting iterates onto successive sublevel sets. Connections to the theory of metric regularity are mentioned, too. The existence of curves of near-steepest descent is proven under reasonable hypotheses in the third section of the paper, while in the next one relations between curves of near-steepest descent and solutions of subgradient dynamical systems in Euclidean spaces are presented or recalled, respectively, by means of variational analysis. In the last section, descent curves for semialgebraic functions are considered and it is shown that such functions always admit nontrivial descent curves emanating from any nonminimizing point.