Nicola Fusco - Böcker

This book deals with a class of mathematical problems which involve the minimization of the sum of a volume and a surface energy and have lately been refered to as 'free discontinuity problems'. The aim of this book is twofold: The first three chapters present all the basic prerequisites for the treatment of free discontinuity and other variational problems in a systematic, general, and self-contained way. In the later chapters, the reader is introduced to the theory of free discontinuity problems, to the space of special functions of bounded variation, and is presented with a detailed analysis of the Mumford-Shah image segmentation problem. Existence, regularity and qualitative properties of solutions are explained and a survey is given on the current knowledge of this challenging mathematical problem. Free discontinuity problems reveal a wide range of applications. The theory embodies classical problems, e.g. related to phase transitions, or fracture and plasticity in continuum mechanics, as well as more recent ones like edge detection in image analysis. This book provides the reader with a solid introduction to the field, written by principle contributors to the theory. The first half of the book contains a comprehensive and updated treatment of the theory of Functions of Bounded Variation and of the mathematical prerequisites of that theory, that is Abstract Measure Theory and Geometric Measure Theory.

This work is a textbook on Mathematical Analysis written by expert lecturers in the field. This textbook, other than the classical differentiation and integration tools for functions of several real variables, metric spaces, ordinary differential equations, implicit function and so on, also provides opportunities to go deeper into certain topics: among them, the Ascoli-Arzelà theorem, the regularity of convex functions in R^n, L^p spaces and absolutely continuous functions, all topics that are paramount in modern Mathematical Analysis. Other instances include the Weierstrass theorem on polynomial approximation of continuous functions or Peano's existence theorem (typically only existence, without uniqueness) for nonlinear ODEs and systems under general assumptions.The content is discussed in an elementary way and, at a successive stage, some topics are examined from several, more penetrating, angles. The agile organization of the subject matter helps instructors to effortlesslydetermine which parts to present during lectures and where to stop. The authors believe that any textbook can contribute to the success of a lecture course only to a point, and the choices made by lecturers are decisive in this respect.The book is addressed to graduate or undergraduate honors students in Mathematics, Physics, Astronomy, Computer Science, Statistics and Probability, attending Mathematical Analysis courses at the Faculties of Science, Engineering, Economics and Architecture.

Collating different aspects of Vector-valued Partial Differential Equations and Applications, this volume is based on the 2013 CIME Course with the same name which took place at Cetraro, Italy, under the scientific direction of John Ball and Paolo Marcellini.

This volume provides the texts of lectures given by L. Ambrosio, L. Caffarelli, M. Crandall, L.C. Evans, N. Fusco at the Summer course held in Cetraro, Italy in 2005. These are introductory reports on current research by world leaders in the fields of calculus of variations and partial differential equations. Coverage includes transport equations for nonsmooth vector fields, viscosity methods for the infinite Laplacian, and geometrical aspects of symmetrization.