Singularities in PDE and the Calculus of Variations

Book excerpt: This book contains papers presented at the "Workshop on Singularities in PDE and the Calculus of Variations" at the CRM in July 2006. The main theme of the meeting was the formation of geometrical singularities in PDE problems with a variational formulation. These equations typically arise in some applications (to physics, engineering, or biology, for example) and their resolution often requires a combination of methods coming from areas such as functional and harmonic analysis, differential geometry and geometric measure theory. Among the PDE problems discussed were: the Cahn-Hilliard model of phase transitions and domain walls; vortices in Ginzburg-Landau type models for superconductivity and superfluidity; the Ohna-Kawasaki model for di-block copolymers; models of image enhancement; and Monge-Ampere functions. The articles give a sampling of problems and methods in this diverse area of mathematics, which touches a large part of modern mathematics and its applications.