Several books deal with Sobolev spaces on open subsets of R (n), but none yet with Sobolev spaces on Riemannian manifolds, despite the fact that the theory of Sobolev spaces on Riemannian manifolds already goes back about 20 years. The book of Emmanuel Hebey will fill this gap, and become a necessary reading for all using Sobolev spaces on Riemannian manifolds.
Hebey's presentation is very detailed, and includes the most recent developments due mainly to the author himself and to Hebey-Vaugon. He makes numerous things more precise, and discusses the hypotheses to test whether they can be weakened, and also presents new results.

Elliptic equations of critical Sobolev growth have been the target of investigation for decades because they have proved to be of great importance in analysis, geometry, and physics. The equations studied here are of the well-known Yamabe type. They involve Schrodinger operators on the left hand side and a critical nonlinearity on the right hand side.

A significant development in the study of such equations occurred in the 1980s. It was discovered that the sequence splits into a solution of the limit equation--a finite sum of bubbles--and a rest that converges strongly to zero in the Sobolev space consisting of square integrable functions whose gradient is also square integrable. This splitting is known as the integral theory for blow-up. In this book, the authors develop the pointwise theory for blow-up. They introduce new ideas and methods that lead to sharp pointwise estimates. These estimates have important applications when dealing with sharp constant problems (a case where the energy is minimal) and compactness results (a case where the energy is arbitrarily large). The authors carefully and thoroughly describe pointwise behavior when the energy is arbitrary.

Intended to be as self-contained as possible, this accessible book will interest graduate students and researchers in a range of mathematical fields."

This volume offers an expanded version of lectures given at the Courant Institute on the theory of Sobolev spaces on Riemannian manifolds. 'Several surprising phenomena appear when studying Sobolev spaces on manifolds,' according to the author. 'Questions that are elementary for Euclidean space become challenging and give rise to sophisticated mathematics, where the geometry of the manifold plays a central role.' The volume is organized into nine chapters. Chapter 1 offers a brief introduction to differential and Riemannian geometry. Chapter 2 deals with the general theory of Sobolev spaces for compact manifolds. Chapter 3 presents the general theory of Sobolev spaces for complete, noncompact manifolds. Best constants problems for compact manifolds are discussed in Chapters 4 and 5.Chapter 6 presents special types of Sobolev inequalities under constraints. Best constants problems for complete noncompact manifolds are discussed in Chapter 7. Chapter 8 deals with Euclidean-type Sobolev inequalities. And Chapter 9 discusses the influence of symmetries on Sobolev embeddings. An appendix offers brief notes on the case of manifolds with boundaries. This topic is a field undergoing great development at this time. However, several important questions remain open. So a substantial part of the book is devoted to the concept of best constants, which appeared to be crucial for solving limiting cases of some classes of PDEs. The volume is highly self-contained. No familiarity is assumed with differentiable manifolds and Riemannian geometry, making the book accessible to a broad audience of readers, including graduate students and researchers.