A new notion of a viscosity solution for Eikonal equations in a general metric space is introduced. A comparison principle is established. The existence of a unique solution is shown by constructing a value function of the corresponding optimal control theory. The theory applies to infinite dimensional setting as well as topological networks, surfaces with singularities.

Abstract. A general anisotropic curvature flow equation with singular interfacial energy and spatially inhomogeneous driving force is considered for a curve given by the graph of a periodic function. We prove that the initial value problem admits a unique global-in-time viscosity solution for a general periodic continuous initial datum. The notion of a viscosity solution used here is the same as proposed by Giga, Giga and Rybka, who established a comparison principle. We construct the global-in-time solution by careful adaptation of Perron's method.

We investigate the asymptotic behavior of a solution of a Hamilton-Jacobi equation defined on a general metric space. Our results include general stability property and large time behavior of the solution. We argue from the viewpoint of viscosity solutions theory and adopt the notion of solution recently introduced by Gangbo and Święch to the Hamilton-Jacobi equation on a geodesic space.

We study a cell problem arising in homogenization for a Hamilton-Jacobi equation whose Hamiltonian is not coercive. We introduce a generalized notion of effective Hamiltonians by approximating the equation and characterize the solvability of the cell problem in terms of the generalized effective Hamiltonian. Under some sufficient conditions, the result is applied to the associated homogenization problem. We also show that homogenization for non-coercive equations fails in general.

We study integrability of the derivative of solutions to a singular one-dimensional parabolic equation with initial data in W 1,1 . In order to avoid additional difficulties we consider only the periodic boundary conditions. The problem we study is a gradient flow of a convex, linear growth variational functional. We also prove a similar result for the elliptic companion problem, i.e. the time semidiscretization.

We study the convexity preserving property for a class of time-dependent Hamilton-Jacobi equations in a complete geodesic space. Assuming that the Hamiltonian is nondecreasing, we show that in a Busemann space the unique metric viscosity solution preserves the geodesic convexity of the initial value at any time. We provide two approaches and also discuss several generalizations for more general geodesic spaces including the lattice graph.

We study one-dimensional very singular parabolic equations with periodic boundary conditions and initial data in BV , which is the energy space. We show existence of solutions in this energy space and then we prove that they are viscosity solutions in the sense of Giga-Giga.

Two different proofs for an inf-sup type representation formula (minimax formula) of the additive eigenvalues corresponding to first-order Hamilton-Jacobi equations are given for quasiconvex (level-set convex) Hamiltonians not necessarily convex. The first proof, which is similar to known proofs for convex Hamiltonians, invokes a Jensen-like inequality for quasiconvex functions instead of the standard Jensen's inequality. The second proof is completely different with elementary calculations. It is based on convergence of derivatives of mollified Lipschitz continuous functions whose proof is also given. These methods also relate to an approximation problem of viscosity solutions.2010 Mathematics Subject Classification. Primary 35F21; Secondary 49L25, 26B25, 26B05.