An introduction to partial differential equations (Q4829997)

The purpose of this book is to put the topic of differential equations on the same footing in the graduate curriculum as algebra and analysis. As such, it contains much more than can be covered in a two-semester course. In fact, the authors describe it as a book for three or four semesters. For the most part, they succeed admirably. The book is extremely well-written with lots of examples and motivation for the theory. The first chapter looks at the basic questions associated with PDEs (existence, uniqueness, and continuous dependence as well as regularity issues) and connects them with the corresponding (usually easier) results for ODEs. The next few chapters examine the basic theory of general PDEs: Chapter 2 presents the theory of characteristics; Chapter 3 is devoted to conservation laws and shocks; and Chapter 4 examines maximum principles for elliptic and parabolic equations. Next are four chapters on functional analysis: Distributions, Function Spaces, Sobolev Spaces and Operator Theory. At this point, the stage is set to study weak solutions of boundary value problems for linear and nonlinear elliptic equations (the authors avoid the Hölder space theory entirely, so the theorems of DeGiorgi, Nash, and Moser on the regularity of weak solutions are not even mentioned). Then, the authors look at energy methods for evolution equations, and they close with a brief study of semigroup methods. To this reviewer's eye, the biggest drawbacks to this text are (1) the graphs in Chapter 1 have axes but not plots and (2) the regularity issues studied in, for example, [\textit{D. Gilbarg} and \textit{N. S. Trudinger}, Elliptic Partial Differential Equations of Second Order (2001; Zbl 1042.35002)] (and dear to my heart) are completely avoided. The first problem is easily remedied by appropriate instructor intervention, and the second is definitely a matter of taste, so I can recommend this book to anyone who wishes to teach an introductory graduate course in partial differential equations without discussing the Hölder theory.