Wolfgang Reichel – författare

Collecting together the lecture notes of the five mini-courses given at the CIME Summer School held in Cetraro (Cosenza, Italy) in the week of June 19–23, 2017, the volume presents a friendly introduction to a broad spectrum of up-to-date and hot topics in the study of PDEs, describing the state-of-the-art in the subject. It also gives further details on the main ideas of the proofs, their technical difficulties, and their possible extension to other contexts. Aiming to be a primary source for researchers in the field, the book will attract potential readers from several areas of mathematics.

A classical problem in the calculus of variations is the investigation of critical points of functionals {\cal L} on normed spaces V. The present work addresses the question: Under what conditions on the functional {\cal L} and the underlying space V does {\cal L} have at most one critical point?

A sufficient condition for uniqueness is given: the presence of a "variational sub-symmetry", i.e., a one-parameter group G of transformations of V, which strictly reduces the values of {\cal L}. The "method of transformation groups" is applied to second-order elliptic boundary value problems on Riemannian manifolds. Further applications include problems of geometric analysis and elasticity.