UCL - SC/MATH - Département de mathématique, Brezis, Haïm, Gossez, Jean-Pierre, De Pauw, Thierry, Bartsch, Thomas, Habets, Patrick, Mawhin, Jean, Willem, Michel, Van Schaftingen, Jean, UCL - SC/MATH - Département de mathématique, Brezis, Haïm, Gossez, Jean-Pierre, De Pauw, Thierry, Bartsch, Thomas, Habets, Patrick, Mawhin, Jean, Willem, Michel, and Van Schaftingen, Jean
The first part of this thesis is devoted to symmetrizations. Symmetrizations are tranformations of functions that preserve many properties of functions and enhance their symmetry. In the calculus of variation they are a simple and powerful tool to prove that minimizers of functionals are symmetric functions. In this work, the approximation of symmetrizations by simpler symmetrizations is investigated: The existence of a universal approximating sequence is proved, sufficient conditions for deterministic and random sequences to be approximating are given. These approximation methods are then used to prove some symmetry properties of critical points obtained by minimax methods: For example if there is a solution obtained by the mountain pass theorem, then there is a symmetric solution with the same energy. This part ends with a study of the properties of anisotropic symmetrizations i.e. symmetrizations performed with respect to noneuclidean norms. The second part is devoted to L^1 estimates. In general, the second derivative of the solution of the Poisson equation with L^1 data fails to be in L^1. Recently it was proved that if the data is a L^1 divergence-free vector-field, then even if in general it is false that the second derivative of the solution is in L^1, all the consequences thereof by Sobolev embeddings hold. Elementary proofs of such results, as well as a generalization with a second order operator replacing the divergence, are given. / La première partie de cette thèse est consacrée aux symétrisations. Les symétrisations sont des transformations de fonctions qui préservent de nombreuses propriétés des fonctions et qui améliorent leur symétrie. Elles sont un outil simple et puissant pour montrer dans le calcul des variations que les minimiseurs de certaines fonctionnelles sont des fonctions symétriques. Dans ce travail, nous étudions l'approximation des symétrisations par des symétrisations plus simples. Nous prouvons l'existence d'une suite approximante un, (MATH 3)--UCL, 2005