Focusing on the mathematical theory of viscous, incompressible fluids, this book presents a clear and accessible exploration of the Navier-Stokes equations. It aims to provide a foundational understanding suitable for beginners, ensuring that readers can grasp the essential concepts without prior advanced knowledge. The content is structured to be self-contained, making it an ideal resource for those interested in fluid dynamics and mathematical physics.
The primary objective of this monograph is to develop an elementary and se- containedapproachtothemathematicaltheoryofaviscousincompressible? uid n in a domain ? of the Euclidean spaceR , described by the equations of Navier- Stokes. The book is mainly directed to students familiar with basic functional analytic tools in Hilbert and Banach spaces. However, for readers’ convenience, in the ? rst two chapters we collect, without proof some fundamental properties of Sobolev spaces, distributions, operators, etc. Another important objective is to formulate the theory for a completely general domain ?. In particular, the theory applies to arbitrary unbounded, non-smooth domains. For this reason, in the nonlinear case, we have to restrict ourselves to space dimensions n=2,3 that are also most signi? cant from the physical point of view. For mathematical generality, we will develop the l- earized theory for all n? 2. Although the functional-analytic approach developed here is, in principle, known to specialists, its systematic treatment is not available, and even the diverseaspectsavailablearespreadoutintheliterature. However, theliterature is very wide, and I did not even try to include a full list of related papers, also because this could be confusing for the student. In this regard, I would like to apologize for not quoting all the works that, directly or indirectly, have inspired this monograph.