Symmetry for Elliptic PDEs

This volume contains contributions from the INdAM School on Symmetry for Elliptic PDEs, which was held May 25-29, 2009, in Rome, Italy. The school marked ""30 years after a conjecture of De Giorgi, and related problems"" and provided an opportunity for experts to discuss the state of the art and open questions on the subject. Motivated by the classical rigidity properties of the minimal surfaces, De Giorgi proposed the study of the one-dimensional symmetry of the monotone solutions of a semilinear, elliptic partial differential equation. Impressive advances have recently been made in this field, though many problems still remain open. Several generalizations to more complicated operators have attracted the attention of pure and applied mathematicians, both for their important theoretical problems and for their relation, among others, with the gradient theory of phase transitions and the dynamical systems.|This volume contains contributions from the INdAM School on Symmetry for Elliptic PDEs, which was held May 25-29, 2009, in Rome, Italy. The school marked ""30 years after a conjecture of De Giorgi, and related problems"" and provided an opportunity for experts to discuss the state of the art and open questions on the subject. Motivated by the classical rigidity properties of the minimal surfaces, De Giorgi proposed the study of the one-dimensional symmetry of the monotone solutions of a semilinear, elliptic partial differential equation. Impressive advances have recently been made in this field, though many problems still remain open. Several generalizations to more complicated operators have attracted the attention of pure and applied mathematicians, both for their important theoretical problems and for their relation, among others, with the gradient theory of phase transitions and the dynamical systems.