The concept of mapped coercivity for nonlinear operators in Banach spaces

Abstract

We provide a concise proof of existence of the solutions to nonlinear operator equations in separable Banach spaces, without assuming the operator to be monotone. Instead, our main hypotheses consist of a continuity assumption and a mapped coercivity property, which is a generalization of the usual coercivity property for nonlinear operators. In the case of linear operators, we recover the traditional inf-sup condition. To illustrate the applicability of this general concept, we apply it to semi-linear elliptic problems and the Navier-Stokes equations.