This book gives a systematic treatment of the basic theory of analytic
semigroups and abstract parabolic equations in general Banach spaces,
and of how such a theory may be used in parabolic PDE's. It takes into
account the developments of the theory during the last fifteen years,
and it is focused on classical solutions, with continuous or Holder
continuous derivatives. On one hand, working in spaces of continuous
functions rather than in Lebesgue spaces seems to be appropriate in view
of the number of parabolic problems arising in applied mathematics,
where continuity has physical meaning; on the other hand it allows one
to consider any type of nonlinearities (even of nonlocal type), even
involving the highest order derivatives of the solution, avoiding the
limitations on the growth of the nonlinear terms required by the LP
approach. Moreover, the continuous space theory is, at present,
sufficiently well established. For the Hilbert space approach we refer
to J. L. LIONS - E. MAGENES [128], M. S. AGRANOVICH - M. l. VISHIK
[14], and for the LP approach to V. A. SOLONNIKOV [184], P. GRISVARD
[94], G. DI BLASIO [72], G. DORE - A. VENNI [76] and the
subsequent papers [90], [169], [170]. Many books about abstract
evolution equations and semigroups contain some chapters on analytic
semigroups. See, e. g., E. HILLE - R. S. PHILLIPS [100]' S. G. KREIN
[114], K. YOSIDA [213], A. PAZY [166], H. TANABE [193], PH.