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This volume contains the proceedings of the AMS Special Session on Harmonic Analysis and Partial Differential Equations, held from April 21–22, 2018, at Northeastern University, Boston, Massachusetts. The book features a series of recent developments at the interface between harmonic analysis and partial differential equations and is aimed toward the theoretical and applied communities of researchers working in real, complex, and harmonic analysis, partial differential equations, and their applications. The topics covered belong to the general areas of the theory of function spaces, partial differential equations of elliptic, parabolic, and dissipative types, geometric optics, free boundary problems, and ergodic theory, and the emphasis is on a host of new concepts, methods, and results.

This is a unique book that provides a comprehensive understanding of nonlinear equations involving the fractional Laplacian as well as other nonlocal operators. Beginning from the definition of fractional Laplacian, it gradually leads the readers to the frontier of current research in this area. The explanations and illustrations are elementary enough so that first year graduate students can follow easily, while it is advanced enough to include many new ideas, methods, and results that appeared recently in research literature, which researchers would find helpful. It focuses on introducing direct methods on the nonlocal problems without going through extensions, such as the direct methods of moving planes, direct method of moving spheres, direct blowing up and rescaling arguments, and so on. Different from most other books, it emphasizes on illuminating the ideas behind the formal concepts and proofs, so that readers can quickly grasp the essence.

The Proceedings of the ICM publishes the talks, by invited speakers, at the conference organized by the International Mathematical Union every 4 years. It covers several areas of Mathematics and it includes the Fields Medal and Nevanlinna, Gauss and Leelavati Prizes and the Chern Medal laudatios.