The classical overdetermined Serrin problem

In this survey we consider the classical overdetermined problem which was studied by Serrin in 1971. The original proof relies on Alexandrov's moving plane method, maximum principles, and a refinement of Hopf's boundary point Lemma. Since then other approaches to the same problem have been devised. Among them we consider the one due to Weinberger which strikes for the elementary arguments used and became very popular. Then we discuss also a duality approach involving harmonic functions, a shape derivative approach and a purely integral approach, all of them not relying on maximum principle. For each one we consider pros and cons as well as some generalizations

On a conjectured reverse Faber-Krahn inequality for a Steklov-type Laplacian eigenvalue

For a given bounded Lipschitz set $\Omega$, we consider a Steklov--type eigenvalue problem for the Laplacian operator whose solutions provide extremal functions for the compact embedding $H^1(\Omega)\hookrightarrow L^2(\partial \Omega)$. We prove that a conjectured reverse Faber--Krahn inequality holds true at least in the class of Lipschitz sets which are "close" to a ball in a Hausdorff metric sense. The result implies that among sets of prescribed measure, balls are local minimizers of the embedding constant

Multiplicative controllability for nonlinear degenerate parabolic equations between sign-changing states

In this paper we study the global approximate multiplicative controllability for nonlinear degenerate parabolic Cauchy problems. In particular, we consider a one-dimensional semilinear degenerate reaction-diffusion equation in divergence form governed via the coefficient of the \-reaction term (bilinear or multiplicative control). The above one-dimensional equation is degenerate since the diffusion coefficient is positive on the interior of the spatial domain and vanishes at the boundary points. Furthermore, two different kinds of degenerate diffusion coefficient are distinguished and studied in this paper: the weakly degenerate case, that is, if the reciprocal of the diffusion coefficient is summable, and the strongly degenerate case, that is, if that reciprocal isn't summable. In our main result we show that the above systems can be steered from an initial continuous state that admits a finite number of points of sign change to a target state with the same number of changes of sign in the same order. Our method uses a recent technique introduced for uniformly parabolic equations employing the shifting of the points of sign change by making use of a finite sequence of initial-value pure diffusion pro\-blems. Our interest in degenerate reaction-diffusion equations is motivated by the study of some \-energy balance models in climatology (see, e.g., the Budyko-Sellers model) and some models in population genetics (see, e.g., the Fleming-Viot model).Comment: arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:1510.0420