Linear and semilinear partial differential equations. An introduction (Q436429)

The book under review focuses on fundamental subjects of partial differential equations encompassing a variety of essential aspects regarding the elliptic and evolutionary problems in the linear and semilinear cases. The book consists of three parts: Classical theory, Modern theory and Semilinear equations. The first part describes various classes of partial differential equations arising in mathematical modeling and presents basic facts of elliptic boundary value problems and mixed and Cauchy problems for evolution equations. The author has done great efforts to provide explicit computations for the formulas involving the Dirichlet and Neumann problems for elliptic equations as well as for the Cauchy-Dirichlet and Cauchy problems for the heat and wave equations. Here one can also find significant material related to Harnack's inequality, maximum principle, Dirichlet's principle, Perron's method and other essential subjects covering a large range of knowledge in linear and nonlinear functional analysis. The second part of the book treats the distributions, Sobolev spaces and elements of variational theory of elliptic boundary value problems. In this part, the solutions are considered in the weak sense paying much attention to their regularity. Variational methods, maximum principles for weak solutions and eigenfunctions are also discussed. The third part of the book addresses the semilinear problems for the elliptic, heat and wave equations, which opens the way to the study of nonlinear partial differential equations. The approach relies on the Nemytskii operators, fixed point theorems, monotone iterative method and critical point theory. The present text is a valuable work that offers simultaneously an excellent introduction and a powerful insight in the field of linear and nonlinear partial differential equations. It provides the reader with important results, methods and tools that are very useful for the abstract and applied mathematics. The text is written in a very clear, systematic and careful manner, the proofs are complete and every chapter contains many applications, examples and exercises. The reviewer evaluates the book as a significant achievement and strongly recommends it to all interested readers.