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Deane Yang
Deane Yang
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Some more random thoughts:

The closest thing I've ever seen to a "general theory of nonlinear PDE's" is Gromov's book, Partial Differential Relations. He does many things in there that I don't understand, but one application that he applied his theory to is isometric embeddings of Riemannian manifolds into Euclidean space or other higher dimensional Riemannian manifolds (the problem made famous by Nash).

Moreover, in a paper by Bryant, Griffiths, and me (but in a section written by the other two and not me), it is shown that in some sense, the linearized PDE corresponding to the isometric embedding of an $n$-dimensional Riemannian manifold into $n(n+1)/2$-dimensional Euclidean space looks like a generic $n$-by-$n$ system of first order linear PDE's. I'm not aware of any other place where a "generic" system of PDE's arises naturally.

The results in this paper inspired some efforts by Jonathan Goodman and me (unpublished) as well as Nakamura and Maeda (TAMS 313 (1989) 1-51) to extend Hormander's theory of linear PDE's (at least those of real principal type) to nonlinear PDE's. (It should be noted that much more interesting work in this direction was done for the 2-dimensional case, starting with the Ph.D. thesis of C. S. Lin)

But maybe you really meant "the general theory of nonlinear PDE's that are elliptic, hyperbolic, or parabolic" and not really the all encompassing "general theory of nonlinear PDE's"? There's far too much junk in the latter.

Some more random thoughts:

The closest thing I've ever seen to a "general theory of nonlinear PDE's" is Gromov's book, Partial Differential Relations. He does many things in there that I don't understand, but one application that he applied his theory to is isometric embeddings of Riemannian manifolds into Euclidean space or other higher dimensional Riemannian manifolds (the problem made famous by Nash).

Moreover, in a paper by Bryant, Griffiths, and me (but in a section written by the other two and not me), it is shown that in some sense, the linearized PDE corresponding to the isometric embedding of an $n$-dimensional Riemannian manifold into $n(n+1)/2$-dimensional Euclidean space looks like a generic $n$-by-$n$ system of first order linear PDE's. I'm not aware of any other place where a "generic" system of PDE's arises naturally.

The results in this paper inspired some efforts by me (unpublished) as well as Nakamura and Maeda (TAMS 313 (1989) 1-51) to extend Hormander's theory of linear PDE's (at least those of real principal type) to nonlinear PDE's. (It should be noted that much more interesting work in this direction was done for the 2-dimensional case, starting with the Ph.D. thesis of C. S. Lin)

But maybe you really meant "the general theory of nonlinear PDE's that are elliptic, hyperbolic, or parabolic" and not really the all encompassing "general theory of nonlinear PDE's"? There's far too much junk in the latter.

Some more random thoughts:

The closest thing I've ever seen to a "general theory of nonlinear PDE's" is Gromov's book, Partial Differential Relations. He does many things in there that I don't understand, but one application that he applied his theory to is isometric embeddings of Riemannian manifolds into Euclidean space or other higher dimensional Riemannian manifolds (the problem made famous by Nash).

Moreover, in a paper by Bryant, Griffiths, and me (but in a section written by the other two and not me), it is shown that in some sense, the linearized PDE corresponding to the isometric embedding of an $n$-dimensional Riemannian manifold into $n(n+1)/2$-dimensional Euclidean space looks like a generic $n$-by-$n$ system of first order linear PDE's. I'm not aware of any other place where a "generic" system of PDE's arises naturally.

The results in this paper inspired some efforts by Jonathan Goodman and me (unpublished) as well as Nakamura and Maeda (TAMS 313 (1989) 1-51) to extend Hormander's theory of linear PDE's (at least those of real principal type) to nonlinear PDE's. (It should be noted that much more interesting work in this direction was done for the 2-dimensional case, starting with the Ph.D. thesis of C. S. Lin)

But maybe you really meant "the general theory of nonlinear PDE's that are elliptic, hyperbolic, or parabolic" and not really the all encompassing "general theory of nonlinear PDE's"? There's far too much junk in the latter.

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Deane Yang
Deane Yang
  • 27.5k
  • 5
  • 89
  • 180

Some more random thoughts:

The closest thing I've ever seen to a "general theory of nonlinear PDE's" is Gromov's book, Partial Differential Relations. He does many things in there that I don't understand, but one application that he applied his theory to is isometric embeddings of Riemannian manifolds into Euclidean space or other higher dimensional Riemannian manifolds (the problem made famous by Nash).

Moreover, in a paper by Bryant, Griffiths, and me (but in a section written by the other two and not me), it is shown that in some sense, the linearized PDE corresponding to the isometric embedding of an $n$-dimensional Riemannian manifold into $n(n+1)/2$-dimensional Euclidean space looks like a generic $n$-by-$n$ system of first order linear PDE's. I'm not aware of any other place where a "generic" system of PDE's arises naturally.

The results in this paper inspired some efforts by me (unpublished) as well as Nakamura and Maeda (TAMS 313 (1989) 1-51) to extend Hormander's theory of linear PDE's (at least those of real principal type) to nonlinear PDE's. (It should be noted that much more interesting work in this direction was done for the 2-dimensional case, starting with the Ph.D. thesis of C. S. Lin)

But maybe you really meant "the general theory of nonlinear PDE's that are elliptic, hyperbolic, or parabolic" and not really the all encompassing "general theory of nonlinear PDE's"? There's far too much junk in the latter.