​Hörmander's operators are an important class of linear elliptic-parabolic degenerate partial differential operators with smooth coefficients, which have been intensively studied since the late 1960s and are still an active field of research. This text provides the reader with a general overview of the field, with its motivations and problems, some of its fundamental results, and some recent lines of development.

Hörmander operators are a class of linear second order partial differential operators with nonnegative characteristic form and smooth coefficients, which are usually degenerate elliptic-parabolic, but nevertheless hypoelliptic, that is highly regularizing. The study of these operators began with the 1967 fundamental paper by Lars Hörmander and is intimately connected to the geometry of vector fields.Motivations for the study of Hörmander operators come for instance from Kolmogorov-Fokker-Planck equations arising from modeling physical systems governed by stochastic equations and the geometric theory of several complex variables. The aim of this book is to give a systematic exposition of a relevant part of the theory of Hörmander operators and vector fields, together with the necessary background and prerequisites.The book is intended for self-study, or as a reference book, and can be useful to both younger and senior researchers, already working in this area or aiming to approach it.

Maximally subelliptic partial differential equations (PDEs) are a far-reaching generalization of elliptic PDEs. Elliptic PDEs hold a special place: sharp results are known for general linear and even fully nonlinear elliptic PDEs. Over the past half-century, important results for elliptic PDEs have been generalized to maximally subelliptic PDEs. This text presents this theory and generalizes the sharp, interior regularity theory for general linear and fully nonlinear elliptic PDEs to the maximally subelliptic setting.

This book provides the reader with a gentle path through the multifaceted theory of vector fields, starting from the definitions and the basic properties of vector fields and flows, and ending with some of their countless applications, in the framework of what is nowadays called Geometrical Analysis. Once the background material is established, the applications mainly deal with the following meaningful settings:

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Hörmander operators are a class of linear second order partial differential operators with nonnegative characteristic form and smooth coefficients, which are usually degenerate elliptic-parabolic, but nevertheless hypoelliptic, that is highly regularizing. The study of these operators began with the 1967 fundamental paper by Lars Hörmander and is intimately connected to the geometry of vector fields.Motivations for the study of Hörmander operators come for instance from Kolmogorov-Fokker-Planck equations arising from modeling physical systems governed by stochastic equations and the geometric theory of several complex variables. The aim of this book is to give a systematic exposition of a relevant part of the theory of Hörmander operators and vector fields, together with the necessary background and prerequisites.The book is intended for self-study, or as a reference book, and can be useful to both younger and senior researchers, already working in this area or aiming to approach it.