This book presents a unified approach to studying the stability of both elliptic Cauchy problems and selected inverse problems. Based on elementary Carleman inequalities, it establishes three-ball inequalities, which are the key to deriving logarithmic stability estimates for elliptic Cauchy problems and are also useful in proving stability estimates for certain elliptic inverse problems. The book presents three inverse problems, the first of which consists in determining the surface impedance of an obstacle from the far field pattern. The second problem investigates the detection of corrosion by electric measurement, while the third concerns the determination of an attenuation coefficient from internal data, which is motivated by a problem encountered in biomedical imaging.

This book is devoted to an introduction of elliptic and parabolic inverse problems. Our goal is to present some recent methods for establishing uniqueness and stability results. We study some classical elliptic inverse problems: inverse conductivity problem, detection of corrosion or cracks and inverse spectral problems. Among the parabolic inverse problems we consider the classic problem of finding an initial distribution of heat and the location of sources. We hope that this book will interest all those who want to learn the mathematical analysis of inverse problems.