The isoperimetric inequality via mass transport

Last week at MSRI we started a  Brown Bag seminar informally named “Beautiful computations’ Seminar”  (credit goes to Juan Luis Vazquez for the idea). The purpose of the seminar (which will be taking place on thursdays around lunch time) is having very short talks explaining a specific “trick” or idea that the speaker considers both beautiful and powerful.

For the first talk of this seminar I presented the proof of the Isoperimetric inequality using mass transport. The proof in this specific form was found independently by N. Trudinger and R. McCann, and it is certainly strongly influenced by work of M. Gromov which I am currently not competent to describe. Modulo the use of the Brenier-McCann theorem from Optimal transport, this is the shortest proof of the isoperimetric theorem  (in general dimensions) that I am aware of .

Further, this method of proof has rather deep ramifications, exemplified by  (sharp) quantitative refinements of the isoperimetric inequality for general non-isotropic area functionals, cf. work of A. Figalli, F. Maggi and A. Pratelli.

MSRI Workshop Day 2 (a week later!): Free boundary problems involving thin films

As much as I would have liked to post something everyday of the conference, writing math blog posts still take me some time. The conference was terrific and as its usual whenever people were not at talks they were by some blackboard or some table finishing or starting a paper. Although its over, I took plenty of notes from several of the talks and will go through some of them within the next week or so. Today I will give an overview of the talk given by Antoine Mellet (University of Maryland) on the second day of the workshop.

Antoine’s talk discussed the thin film equation, I know very little about this subject (in fact all I know I learned from Antoine’s talk last week) so take some of the things I say with a grain of salt. The thin film equation models the spreading of a drop or thin layer of liquid on top of a flat, impermeable surface and there is a vast literature on the subject, see for instance this survey by Andrea Bertozzi. Incidentally, Terry Tao discussed the closely related shallow water wave equation in a blog plost yesterday.

The thin film equation is the fourth-order non-linear equation

where typically and one has boundary conditions (which I will explain in a bit)

MSRI Workshop, Day 1: Unique continuation for Nonlinear PDEs

This week MSRI is a rather busy place, as the flagship workshop of the program on Free boundary problems is taking place. Luis Silvestre (who happens to be my mathematical older brother) gave a talk this monday on his very recent work with Scott Armstrong, which deals with unique continuation for nonlinear elliptic PDEs, this post is an overview of his talk. A preprint of their work is available on the arxiv.

As usual, any potential mistakes and inaccuracies in the presentation below are due to the author of this post and shouldn’t reflect on what was a terrific lecture by Luis.

The main question stems from the analytic continuation property for Laplace’s equation , which is a very well known classical fact. A fact which however, is not “so easy” to prove. Classically, it says the following, let us put for a second then “unique continuation” refers to the following fact:

Update: Blog restarted, new name+new blog address!

After an almost year long hiatus I am getting back into math blogging.  The new http address is a bit long but at least easy to remember! (turns out “pdeblog.wordpress.com” was already taken!)

The old site will be up at least for a while, but all the old posts have been copied to this new blog. To reflect the fact that nearly all posts here have dealt with Partial Differential Equations the new site will go by the name  “PDE Blog”.

Reviewing the regularity theory of elliptics PDEs via the Laplace equation. Part III. (representation formulas)

This is the third of a series of posts dealing with the regularity theory of elliptic equations. My motivation in writing these is outlined in the first post. The previous post is here.

Let us recall Green’s identity, if are any functions smooth in and is a bounded domain with smooth boundary we have

this identity can be obtained with a couple of integration by parts involving the vector fields and .

Lets rewrite the identity as

thus, at least formally, if somehow we could find for every a function such that

then Green’s identity applied to both and in would give us an integral representation formula for harmonic functions

Reviewing the regularity theory of elliptics PDEs via the Laplace equation. Part II.

This is the second of a series of posts dealing with the regularity theory of elliptic equations. My motivation in writing these is outlined in the first post.

Some consequences of Harnack’s inequality the Mean value property

The mean value property is characteristic of harmonic functions, but the fact that harmonic functions control their pointwise values by their local average is a general fact that is characteristic of elliptic equations (as we will see later, less sharp but more general theorems for nonlinear elliptic equations still have this flavor and are at the very heart of the regularity theory of fully nonlinear elliptic PDEs). Let me mention a few of its consequences, I already talked last time about Harnack’s inequality, as it follows from the mean value theorem, the mean value theorem (at least for harmonic functions) is more fundamental.

Joint Mathematics Meetings in San Francisco -Blog!

…and now for a little advertisement:

My friend and former UT graduate student Adriana Salerno (currently at Bates) will be running the 2010 AMS Joint Math meetings blog. She was also in charge of the blog in previous years (you can check them out here and here). I recommend you check it out in the next few days to see what has been going on at the meetings (specially if, just like me, you don’t happen to be in San Francisco this week).

Reviewing the regularity theory of elliptics PDEs via the Laplace equation. Part I.

There is a tedious, simple but hopefully fruitful exercise I always wanted to do. It is to review all the different proofs of the Harnack inequality and regularity of solutions to elliptic equations that I know, but only for the Laplace equation. First, because it is a good way to really get your hands on some of the ideas of several deep theorems (like those of De Giorgi-Nash-Moser and Krylov-Safonov) in the simplest possible setting. Second, because looking at all the different proofs it is possible to trace the evolution of analysis and PDEs through the last century (and a bit before that) and appreciate the level maturity reached in several fields: potential theory, singular integrals, calculus of variations, fully non linear elliptic PDE and free boundary problems. The `simple’ and `elementary’ Laplace equation lies at the intersection of all these fields, so every new breakthrough reflected on our understanding of this equation, each new proof emphasizing a different approach or point of view. Each of the proofs that I will discuss are based on one of the following:

• The mean value property (the proof you learn in your typical complex variables or introductory PDE course).
• The Poisson Kernel for the ball (the proof from potential theory).
• The Calderón-Zygmund theorem (ok not exactly a `Harnack inequality’, but it should be on this list anyway) which uses the machinery of singular integrals.
• The De Giorgi-Nash-Moser theorem, which follows the variational point of view and it is best suited for quasilinear equations or equations in divergence form.
• The Aleksandrov-Bakelman-Pucci estimate and the Krylov-Safonov’s `Harnack’s inequality’, which follows the comparison principle point of view and it is best suited for fully non linear equations or equations in non-divergence form.

So I am going to review each theorem and its proof but only for Laplace’s equation: . To start off easy, I am going to do first the proof via the mean value property.

First proof: mean value property

The mean value property says basically this

Let be a function in the unit ball of . If and is a sphere contained in and centered at , then equals the average of on

It is not hard to prove with some calculus, one basically looks at the function `Average of on the sphere of radius centered at ‘= and shows that , and since by continuity , the theorem follows. To show one sees (by say, a change of variables) that and this last integral is zero thanks to Stokes’ theorem and the fact that . Moreove, integrating the result with respect to the radius of the sphere one gets the same statement where instead of average over a sphere we have an average over a ball.

With this, one may prove easily Harnack’s inequality for harmonic functions, which I will state formally for the first time

Theorem 1 For any nonnegative harmonic function in we have the inequality

Proof. Let , then the ball of radius centered at (call it ) is completely contained in , thus by the mean value property

but again since is contained in and is nonnegative we have , again by the mean value property. This finishes the proof.

That is for today, in the next post I will explain some of the consequences of this theorem and maybe move on to the proof with potential theory methods.

(Note: this post was made using Luca Trevisan’s Latex to WordPress program, which is very useful although I am still getting used to using it. It allows you to prepare your post in a latex editor and then translate it into HTML code which WordPress can read, I strongly recommend it)

New year, new posts

After 4 months of inactivity, I am taking up again the task of updating the blog, which has suffered of neglect due to my terrible time management skills.

I am not going to take off from where I left last time (namely, the posts about the Minkowski problem, which I will finish, someday), but instead will start the year with some shorter, lighter posts. I plant to start with a few posts about varifolds vs currents vs BV sets, and also about the Harnack inequality, maybe later I will write a bit about topics from phase transitions such as the Stefan problem or the Cahn-Hilliard equation

If you want to kill your productivity, move to a new house!

I know things have been extremely slow lately, but I was moving last week (and well, that means packing everything, moving things to the new house, cleaning the old house, unpacking things at the new one… well, you get the picture).

My goal for this week is presenting Aleksandrov’s solution to  the Minkowski problem (see an earlier post I did introducing this problem). So I am going to leave you a problem as a preview, it is a sort of discrete version of the Minkowski problem:

Let   be a family of non-coplanar unit vectors in and let be positive numbers such that

Then, show that there exists a convex closed polyhedron with exactly faces with normal vectors given by and corresponding areas . Plus, this polyhedron is unique up to translation.

This is fact is not surprising (since it is not hard to check that any polyhedron has this property), but the proof is far from trivial. As you may guess, the proof cannot be constructive, it will use a continuity argument to show that there must be at least one such polyhedron. I will present this in my next post.