第１部： "How Poincare became my hero" （ポアンカレ記念特別講演）

Abstract： I recently discovered little-known texts of Poincare which include fundamental results on PDEs together with prophetic insights into their future impact on various branches of modern mathematics.

第２部： "Can you hear the degree of a map from the circle into itself? An intriguing story which is not yet finished"

Abstract： A few years ago - following a suggestion by I. M. Gelfand - I discovered an intriguing connection between the topological degree of a map from the circle into itself and its Fourier coefficients. This relation is easily justified when the map is smooth. However, the situation turns out to be much more delicate if one assumes only continuity, or even Holder continuity. I will present recent developments and open problems. The initial motivation for this direction of research came from the analysis of the Ginzburg-Landau model.

第３部： "Sobolev maps with values into the circle"

Abstract： Sobolev functions with values into R are very well understood and play an immense role in many branches of Mathematics. By contrast, the theory of Sobolev maps with values into the unit circle is still under construction. Such maps occur e.g. in the asymptotic analysis of the Ginzburg-Landau model. The reason one is interested in Sobolev maps, rather than smooth maps is to allow singularities such as x/|x| in 2D or line singularities 3D which appear in physical problems. Our focus in these lectures is not the Ginzburg-Landau equation per se, but rather the intrinsic study of the function space W^{1,p} of maps from a smooth domain in R^N taking their values into the unit circle. Such classes of maps have an amazingly rich structure. Geometrical and Topological effects are already noticeable in this simple framework, since S^1 has nontrivial topology. Moreover the fact that the target space is the circle (as opposed to higher-dimensional manifolds) offers the option to introduce a lifting. We'll see that "optimal liftings" are in one-to-one correspondence with minimal connections (resp. minimal surfaces) spanned by the topological singularities of u.
I will also discuss the question of uniqueness of lifting . A key ingredient in some of the proofs is a formula (due to myself, Bourgain and Mironescu) which provides an original way of approximating Sobolev norms (or the total variation) by nonlocal functionals. Nonconvex versions of these functionals raise very challenging questions recently tackled together with H.-M. Nguyen. Comparable functionals also occur in Image Processing and suggest exciting interactions with this field.