Free Boundary Problems: Theory and Applications

This book gathers a collection of refereed articles containing original results reporting the recent contributions of the lectures and communications presented at the Free Boundary Problems Conference that took place at the University of Coimbra, Portugal, from June 7 to 12, 2005 (FBP2005). They deal with the mathematics of a broad class of models and problems involving nonlinear partial differential equations arising in physics, engineering, biology and finance. Among the main topics, the talks considered free boundary problems in biomedicine, in porous media, in thermodynamic modeling, in fluid mechanics, in image processing, in financial mathematics or in computations for inter-scale problems. The mathematical analysis and fine properties of solutions and interfaces in free boundary problems have been an active subject in the last three decades and their mathematical understanding continues to be an important interdisciplinary tool for the scientific applications, on one hand, and an intrinsic aspect of the current development of several important mathematical disciplines.