What is … a variational inequality?

This page hosts information on Carsten Gräser's talk "What is … a variational inequality?" at the "What is …?" seminar. The talk will take place on Friday, July 12, 1:15pm at the BMS Loft at Urania. This talk will help you better understand the talk by Barbara Wohlmuth, which will start at 2pm.

Abstract

Solutions of optimization problems can be characterized nicely by variational equations if their associated functional is smooth. For nonsmooth functionals, variational inequalities provide a useful generalization while only requiring that part of the functional is differentiable.

After discussing the relation of minimization problems to variational inequalities, I will show how we can use the latter to extract some important features of such problems.

Comments