We revisit the problem of approximating minimizers of certain convex functionals subject to a convexity constraint by solutions of fourth order equations of Abreu type. This approximation problem was studied in previous articles of Carlier–Radice (Approximation of variational problems with a convexity constraint by PDEs of Abreu type. Calc. Var. Partial Differential Equations58 (2019), no. 5, Art. 170) and the author (Singular Abreu equations and minimizers of convex functionals with a convexity constraint, arXiv:1811.02355v3, Comm. Pure Appl. Math., to appear), under the uniform convexity of both the Lagrangian and constraint barrier. By introducing a new approximating scheme, we completely remove the uniform convexity of both the Lagrangian and constraint barrier. Our analysis is applicable to variational problems motivated by the original 2D Rochet–Choné model in the monopolist's problem in Economics, and variational problems arising in the analysis of wrinkling patterns in floating elastic shells in Elasticity.

We consider a deformation $E_{L,\unicode[STIX]{x1D6EC}}^{(m)}(it)$ of the Dedekind eta function depending on two $d$-dimensional simple lattices $(L,\unicode[STIX]{x1D6EC})$ and two parameters $(m,t)\in (0,\infty )$, initially proposed by Terry Gannon. We show that the minimisers of the lattice theta function are the maximisers of $E_{L,\unicode[STIX]{x1D6EC}}^{(m)}(it)$ in the space of lattices with fixed density. The proof is based on the study of a lattice generalisation of the logarithm, called the lattice logarithm, also defined by Terry Gannon. We also prove that the natural logarithm is characterised by a variational problem over a class of one-dimensional lattice logarithms.

It is proved that c-cyclical monotonicity is a sufficient condition for optimality in the multi-marginal optimal transport problem with Coulomb repulsive cost. The notion of c-splitting set and some mild regularity property are the tools. The result may be extended to Coulomb like costs.

In this note, we prove the Payne-type conjecture about the behaviour of the nodal set of least energy sign-changing solutions for the equation $-\Delta _p u = f(u)$ in bounded Steiner symmetric domains $ \Omega \subset {{\open R}^N} $ under the zero Dirichlet boundary conditions. The nonlinearity f is assumed to be either superlinear or resonant. In the latter case, least energy sign-changing solutions are second eigenfunctions of the zero Dirichlet p-Laplacian in Ω. We show that the nodal set of any least energy sign-changing solution intersects the boundary of Ω. The proof is based on a moving polarization argument.

In this paper, we prove that on a compact, $n$-dimensional Alexandrov space with curvature at least −1, the Wasserstein barycenter of Borel probability measures ${{\mu }_{1}},\ldots ,{{\mu }_{m}}$ is absolutely continuous with respect to the $n$-dimensional Hausdorff measure if one of them is.

The isotropic constant $L_{K}$ is an affine-invariant measure of the spread of a convex body $K$. For a $d$-dimensional convex body $K$, $L_{K}$ can be defined by $L_{K}^{2d}=\det (A(K))/(\text{vol}(K))^{2}$, where $A(K)$ is the covariance matrix of the uniform distribution on $K$. It is an open problem to find a tight asymptotic upper bound of the isotropic constant as a function of the dimension. It has been conjectured that there is a universal constant upper bound. The conjecture is known to be true for several families of bodies, in particular, highly symmetric bodies such as bodies having an unconditional basis. It is also known that maximizers cannot be smooth. In this work we study bodies that are neither smooth nor highly symmetric by showing progress towards reducing to a highly symmetric case among non-smooth bodies. More precisely, we study the set of maximizers among simplicial polytopes and we show that if a simplicial polytope $K$ is a maximizer of the isotropic constant among $d$-dimensional convex bodies, then when $K$ is put in isotropic position it is symmetric around any hyperplane spanned by a $(d-2)$-dimensional face and the origin. By a result of Campi, Colesanti and Gronchi, this implies that a simplicial polytope that maximizes the isotropic constant must be a simplex.

We study a multimarginal optimal transportation problem in one dimension. For a symmetric, repulsive cost function, we show that, given a minimizing transport plan, its symmetrization is induced by a cyclical map, and that the symmetric optimal plan is unique. The class of costs that we consider includes, in particular, the Coulomb cost, whose optimal transport problem is strictly related to the strong interaction limit of Density Functional Theory. In this last setting, our result justifies some qualitative properties of the potentials observed in numerical experiments.

In this paper we consider the problem of routing customers to identical servers, each with its own infinite-capacity queue. Under the assumptions that (i) the service times form a sequence of independent and identically distributed random variables with increasing failure rate distribution and (ii) state information is not available, we establish that the round-robin policy minimizes, in the sense of a separable increasing convex ordering, the customer response times and the numbers of customers in the queues.