Stephen Simons – författare

The present volume contains the proceedings of the workshop on "Minimax Theory and Applications" that was held during the week 30 September - 6 October 1996 at the "G. Stampacchia" International School of Mathematics of the "E. Majorana" Centre for Scientific Cul­ ture in Erice (Italy) . The main theme of the workshop was minimax theory in its most classical meaning. That is to say, given a real-valued function f on a product space X x Y , one tries to find conditions that ensure the validity of the equality sup inf f(x,y) = inf sup f(x, y). yEY xEX xEX yEY This is not an appropriate place to enter into the technical details of the proofs of minimax theorems, or into the history of the contribu­ tions to the solution of this basic problem in the last 7 decades. But we do want to stress its intrinsic interest and point out that, in spite of its extremely simple formulation, it conceals a great wealth of ideas. This is clearly shown by the large variety of methods and tools that have been used to study it. The applications of minimax theory are also extremely interesting. In fact, the need for the ability to "switch quantifiers" arises in a seemingly boundless range of different situations. So, the good quality of a minimax theorem can also be judged by its applicability. We hope that this volume will offer a rather complete account of the state of the art of the subject.

In this new edition of LNM 1693 the essential idea is to reduce questions on monotone multifunctions to questions on convex functions. However, rather than using a “big convexification” of the graph of the multifunction and the “minimax technique”for proving the existence of linear functionals satisfying certain conditions, the Fitzpatrick function is used. The journey begins with a generalization of the Hahn-Banach theorem uniting classical functional analysis, minimax theory, Lagrange multiplier theory and convex analysis and culminates in a survey of current results on monotone multifunctions on a Banach space.The first two chapters are aimed at students interested in the development of the basic theorems of functional analysis, which leads painlessly to the theory of minimax theorems, convex Lagrange multiplier theory and convex analysis. The remaining five chapters are useful for those who wish to learn about the current research on monotone multifunctions on (possibly non reflexive) Banach space.

Focusing on the theory of monotone multifunctions on a Banach space, this work looks at the big convexification of a multi-function, convex functions associated with a multifunction, minimax theorems as a tool in functional analysis, and convex analysis. Topics include: results on the existence of continuous linear functionals; the conjugates, biconjugates and subdifferentials of convex lower semicontinuous functions; Fenchel duality; positive linear operators from a Banach space into its dual; the sum of maximal monotone operators; and a list of open problems. The reader is expected to know basic functional analysis and calculus of variations, including the Bahn-Banach theorem, Banach-Alaoglu theorem, and Ekeland's variational principle.

The present volume contains the proceedings of the workshop on "Minimax Theory and Applications" that was held during the week 30 September - 6 October 1996 at the "G. Stampacchia" International School of Mathematics of the "E. Majorana" Centre for Scientific Cul­ ture in Erice (Italy) . The main theme of the workshop was minimax theory in its most classical meaning. That is to say, given a real-valued function f on a product space X x Y , one tries to find conditions that ensure the validity of the equality sup inf f(x,y) = inf sup f(x, y). yEY xEX xEX yEY This is not an appropriate place to enter into the technical details of the proofs of minimax theorems, or into the history of the contribu­ tions to the solution of this basic problem in the last 7 decades. But we do want to stress its intrinsic interest and point out that, in spite of its extremely simple formulation, it conceals a great wealth of ideas. This is clearly shown by the large variety of methods and tools that have been used to study it. The applications of minimax theory are also extremely interesting. In fact, the need for the ability to "switch quantifiers" arises in a seemingly boundless range of different situations. So, the good quality of a minimax theorem can also be judged by its applicability. We hope that this volume will offer a rather complete account of the state of the art of the subject.