Deformations of functionals and bifurcations of extremals.

We study homology characteristics of critical values and extremals of Lipschitz functionals defined on bounded closed convex subsets of a reflexive space that are invariant under deformations. Sufficient conditions for the existence of a bifurcation point of a multivalued potential operator (the switch principle for the typical number of an extremal) are established. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]