Integral equations and applications A. G. Ramm Mathematics Department, Kansas State University, Manhattan, KS 66502, USA email:
[email protected] Keywords: integral equations, applications MSC 2010 35J05, 47A50 The goal of this Section is to formulate some of the basic results on the theory of integral equations and mention some of its applications. The literature of this subject is very large. Proofs are not given due to the space restriction. The results are taken from the works mentioned in the references. 1. Fredholm equations 1.1. Fredholm alternative One of the most important results of the theory of integral equations is the Fredholm alternative. The results in this Subsection are taken from [5], [20],[21], [6]. Consider the equation u = Ku + f, Ku = K(x, y)u(y)dy. (1) ZD arXiv:1503.00652v1 [math.CA] 2 Mar 2015 Here f and K(x, y) are given functions, K(x, y) is called the kernel of the operator K. Equation (1) is considered usually in H = L2(D) or C(D). 2 1/2 The first is a Hilbert space with the norm ||u|| := D |u| dx and the second is a Banach space with the norm ||u|| = sup |u(x)|. If the domain x∈D R D ⊂ Rn is assumed bounded, then K is compact in H if, for example, 2 D D |K(x, y)| dxdy < ∞, and K is compact in C(D) if, for example, K(x, y) is a continuous function, or, more generally, sup |K(x, y)|dy < ∞. R R x∈D D For equation (1) with compact operators, the basic result is the Fredholm R alternative.