Functional Inequalities: New Perspectives and New Applications

This book is not meant to be another compendium of select inequalities, nor does it claim to contain the latest or the slickest ways of proving them. This project is rather an attempt at describing how most functional inequalities are not merely the byproduct of ingenious guess work by a few wizards among us, but are often manifestations of certain natural mathematical structures and physical phenomena. Our main goal here is to show how this point of view leads to "systematic" approaches for not just proving the most basic functional inequalities, but also for understanding and improving them, and for devising new ones - sometimes at will, and often on demand.Comment: 17 pages; contact Nassif Ghoussoub (nassif @ math.ubc.ca) for a pre-publication pdf cop

Very Singular Similarity Solutions and Hermitian Spectral Theory for Semilinear Odd-Order PDEs

Very singular self-similar solutions of semilinear odd-order PDEs are studied on the basis of a Hermitian-type spectral theory for linear rescaled odd-order operators.Comment: 49 pages, 12 Figure

A Liouville theorem for ancient solutions to a semilinear heat equation and its elliptic counterpart

We establish the nonexistence of nontrivial ancient solutions to the nonlinear heat equation $u_t=\Delta u+|u|^{p-1}u$ which are smaller in absolute value than the self-similar radial singular steady state, provided that the exponent $p$ is strictly between Serrin's exponent and that of Joseph and Lundgren. This result was previously established by Fila and Yanagida [Tohoku Math. J. (2011)] by using forward self-similar solutions as barriers. In contrast, we apply a sweeping argument with a family of time independent weak supersolutions. Our approach naturally lends itself to yield an analogous Liouville type result for the steady state problem in higher dimensions. In fact, in the case of the critical Sobolev exponent we show the validity of our results for solutions that are smaller in absolute value than a 'Delaunay'-type singular solution.Comment: In this third version, we clarified that the approach of Fila and Yanagida [Tohoku Math. J. (2011)] also works in the subcritical regim

Hyperboloidal layers for hyperbolic equations on unbounded domains

We show how to solve hyperbolic equations numerically on unbounded domains by compactification, thereby avoiding the introduction of an artificial outer boundary. The essential ingredient is a suitable transformation of the time coordinate in combination with spatial compactification. We construct a new layer method based on this idea, called the hyperboloidal layer. The method is demonstrated on numerical tests including the one dimensional Maxwell equations using finite differences and the three dimensional wave equation with and without nonlinear source terms using spectral techniques.Comment: 23 pages, 23 figure

Entire large solutions for semilinear elliptic equations

We analyze the semilinear elliptic equation $\Delta u=\rho(x) f(u)$, $u>0$ in ${\mathbf R}^D$ $(D\ge3)$, with a particular emphasis put on the qualitative study of entire large solutions, that is, solutions $u$ such that $\lim_{|x|\rightarrow +\infty}u(x)=+\infty$. Assuming that $f$ satisfies the Keller-Osserman growth assumption and that $\rho$ decays at infinity in a suitable sense, we prove the existence of entire large solutions. We then discuss the more delicate questions of asymptotic behavior at infinity, uniqueness and symmetry of solutions.Comment: Journal of Differential Equations 2012, 28 page