The goal of the book is to extend classical regularity theorems for solutions of linear elliptic partial differential equations to the context of fully nonlinear elliptic equations. This class of equations often arises in control theory, optimization, and other applications. The authors give a detailed presentation of all the necessary techniques. Instead of treating these techniques in their greatest generality, they outline the key ideas and prove the results needed for developing the subsequent theory. Topics discussed in the book include the theory of viscosity solutions for nonlinear equations, the Alexandroff estimate and Krylov-Safonov Harnack-type inequality for viscosity solutions, uniqueness theory for viscosity solutions, Evans and Krylov regularity theory for convex fully nonlinear equations, and regularity theory for fully nonlinear equations with variable coefficients.

Nonlocal elliptic equations have long been used by physicists and engineers to model diffusion processes involving jumps. Apart from several works from a probabilistic view, there had not been much development concerning their mathematical properties until the fundamental works of Caffarelli and Silvestre. Here we establish several results concerning the regularity of viscosity solutions to nonlocal elliptic equations. In particular, we show the existence of smooth solutions to two class of nonlocal fully nonlinear elliptic equations, an integrability estimate for the fractional order Hessian of solutions to nonlocal equations, as well as a theory of at solutions.

This book collects many helpful techniques for obtaining regularity results for solutions of nonlinear systems of partial differential equations. These are applied in various cases to provide useful examples and relevant results, particularly in such fields as fluid mechanics, solid mechanics, semiconductor theory and game theory.

The material presented here corresponds to Fermi lectures that I was invited to deliver at the Scuola Normale di Pisa in the spring of 1998. The obstacle problem consists in studying the properties of minimizers of the Dirichlet integral in a domain D of Rn, among all those configurations u with prescribed boundary values and costrained to remain in D above a prescribed obstacle F. In the Hilbert space H1(D) of all those functions with square integrable gradient, we consider the closed convex set K of functions u with fixed boundary value and which are greater than F in D. There is a unique point in K minimizing the Dirichlet integral. That is called the solution to the obstacle problem.

The thesis is divided into two parts. The first part is mainly concerned with regularity issues for integro-differential (or nonlocal) elliptic and parabolic equations. In the same way that densities of particles with Brownian motion solve second order elliptic or parabolic equations, densities of particles with Lévy diffusion satisfy these more general nonlocal equations. In this context, fully nonlinear nonlocal equations arise in Stochastic control problems or differential games. The typical example of elliptic nonlocal operator is the fractional Laplacian, which is the only translation, rotation and scaling invariant nonlocal elliptic operator. There many classical regularity results for the fractional Laplacian --whose ̀̀inverse'' is the Riesz potential. For instance, the explicit Poisson kernel for a ball is an ̀̀old'' result, as well as the linear solvability theory in L̂p spaces. However, very little was known on boundary regularity for these problems. A main topic of this thesis is the study of this boundary regularity, which is qualitatively very different from that for second order equations. We stablish a new boundary regularity theory for fully nonlinear (and linear) elliptic integro-differential equations. Our proofs require a combination of original techniques and appropriate versions of classical ones for second order equations (such as Krylov's method). We also obtain new interior regularity results for fully nonlinear parabolic nonlocal equation with rough kernels. To do it, we develop a blow up and compactness method for viscosity solutions to fully nonlinear equations that allows us to prove regularity from Liouville type theorems.This method is a main contribution of the thesis. The new boundary regularity results mentioned above are crucially used in the proof of another main result of the thesis: the Pohozaev identity for the fractional Laplacian. This identity is has a flavor of integration by parts formula for the fractional Laplacian, with the important novely there appears a local boundary term (this was unusual with nolocal equations). In the second part of the thesis we give two instances of interaction between isoperimetry and Partial Differential Equations. In the first one we use the Alexandrov-Bakelman-Pucci method for elliptic PDE to obtain new sharp isoperimetric inequalities in cones with densities by generalizing a proof of the classical isoperimetric inequality due to Cabré. Our new results contain as particular cases the classical Wulff inequality and the isoperimetric inequality in cones of Lions and Pacella. In the second instance we use the isoperimetric inequality and the classical Pohozaev identity to establish a radial symmetry result for second order reaction-diffusion equations. The novelty here is to include discontinuous nonlinearities. For this, we extend a two-dimensional argument of P.-L. Lions from 1981 to obtain now results in higher dimensions.

This book concentrates on first boundary-value problems for fully nonlinear second-order uniformly elliptic and parabolic equations with discontinuous coefficients. We look for solutions in Sobolev classes, local or global, or for viscosity solutions. Most of the auxiliary results, such as Aleksandrov's elliptic and parabolic estimates, the Krylov–Safonov and the Evans–Krylov theorems, are taken from old sources, and the main results were obtained in the last few years. Presentation of these results is based on a generalization of the Fefferman–Stein theorem, on Fang-Hua Lin's like estimates, and on the so-called “ersatz” existence theorems, saying that one can slightly modify “any” equation and get a “cut-off” equation that has solutions with bounded derivatives. These theorems allow us to prove the solvability in Sobolev classes for equations that are quite far from the ones which are convex or concave with respect to the Hessians of the unknown functions. In studying viscosity solutions, these theorems also allow us to deal with classical approximating solutions, thus avoiding sometimes heavy constructions from the usual theory of viscosity solutions.

This book presents applications of noncommutative and nonassociative algebras to constructing unusual (nonclassical and singular) solutions to fully nonlinear elliptic partial differential equations of second order. The methods described in the book are used to solve a longstanding problem of the existence of truly weak, nonsmooth viscosity solutions. Moreover, the authors provide an almost complete description of homogeneous solutions to fully nonlinear elliptic equations. It is shown that even in the very restricted setting of "Hessian equations", depending only on the eigenvalues of the Hessian, these equations admit homogeneous solutions of all orders compatible with known regularity for viscosity solutions provided the space dimension is five or larger. To the contrary, in dimension four or less the situation is completely different, and our results suggest strongly that there are no nonclassical homogeneous solutions at all in dimensions three and four. Thus this book gives a complete list of dimensions where nonclassical homogeneous solutions to fully nonlinear uniformly elliptic equations do exist; this should be compared with the situation of, say, ten years ago when the very existence of nonclassical viscosity solutions was not known.