This book presents a systematic exposition of the main ideas and methods in treating inverse problems for PDEs arising in basic mathematical models, though it makes no claim to being exhaustive. Mathematical models of most physical phenomena are governed by initial and boundary value problems for PDEs, and inverse problems governed by these equations arise naturally in nearly all branches of science and engineering. The book's content, especially in the Introduction and Part I, is self-contained and is intended to also be accessible for beginning graduate students, whose mathematical background includes only basic courses in advanced calculus, PDEs and functional analysis. Further, the book can be used as the backbone for a lecture course on inverse and ill-posed problems for partial differential equations. In turn, the second part of the book consists of six nearly-independent chapters. The choice of these chapters was motivated by the fact that the inverse coefficient and source problems considered here are based on the basic and commonly used mathematical models governed by PDEs. These chapters describe not only these inverse problems, but also main inversion methods and techniques. Since the most distinctive features of any inverse problems related to PDEs are hidden in the properties of the corresponding solutions to direct problems, special attention is paid to the investigation of these properties. For the second edition, the authors have added two new chapters focusing on real-world applications of inverse problems arising in wave and vibration phenomena. They have also revised the whole text of the first edition.

This book presents a systematic exposition of the main ideas and methods in treating inverse problems for PDEs arising in basic mathematical models, though it makes no claim to being exhaustive. Mathematical models of most physical phenomena are governed by initial and boundary value problems for PDEs, and inverse problems governed by these equations arise naturally in nearly all branches of science and engineering. The book's content, especially in the Introduction and Part I, is self-contained and is intended to also be accessible for beginning graduate students, whose mathematical background includes only basic courses in advanced calculus, PDEs and functional analysis. Further, the book can be used as the backbone for a lecture course on inverse and ill-posed problems for partial differential equations. In turn, the second part of the book consists of six nearly-independent chapters. The choice of these chapters was motivated by the fact that the inverse coefficient and source problems considered here are based on the basic and commonly used mathematical models governed by PDEs. These chapters describe not only these inverse problems, but also main inversion methods and techniques. Since the most distinctive features of any inverse problems related to PDEs are hidden in the properties of the corresponding solutions to direct problems, special attention is paid to the investigation of these properties. For the second edition, the authors have added two new chapters focusing on real-world applications of inverse problems arising in wave and vibration phenomena. They have also revised the whole text of the first edition.

M.M. Lavrentiev is the author of many fundamental scientific results in many directions of mathematics and its applications, such as differential equations, inverse and ill-posed problems, tomography, numerical and applied mathematics. His results in the theory of inverse problems for differential equations and in tomography are well known all over the world. To honour him on the occasion of his 70th birthday renowned scientists in this field of mathematics, both from East and West, have contributed to this special collection of papers on ill-posed and inverse problems, which will be of interest to anyone working in this field.

This monograph deals with some inverse problems of mathematical physics. It introduces new methods for studying inverse problems and gives obtained results, which are related to the conditional well posedness of the problems. The main focus lies on time-domain inverse problems for hyperbolic equations and the kinetic transport equation.