This paper establishes the local exact null controllability of the diffusion equation in one dimension using distributed controls in the case of the Dirichlet boundary value problem. Most of the techniques used in the course of the proof are borrowed from Barbu (2002).

Focal decomposition associated to an ordinary differential equation of the second order is a partition of the set of all two-points boundary value problems according to the number of their solutions. Two equations are called focally equivalent if there exists a homomorphism of the set of two-points problems to itself such that the image of the focal decomposition associated to the first equation is a focal decomposition associated to the second one. In this paper, we present a complete classification for linear second-order equations with respect to this equivalence relation.

The aim of this paper is to prove new existence and multiplicity results for periodic semilinear beam equation with a nonlinear time-independent perturbation in case the period is not prescribed. Since the spectrum of the linear part varies with the period, the solvability of the equation depends crucially on the period which can be chosen as a free parameter. Since the period of the external forcing is generally unknown a priori, we consider the following natural problem. For a given time-independent nonlinearity, find periods $T$ for which the equation is solvable for any $T$-periodic forcing. We will also deal with the existence of multiple solutions when the nonlinearity interacts with the spectrum of the linear part. We show that under certain conditions multiple solutions do exist for any small forcing term with suitable period $T$. The results are obtained via generalized Leray-Schauder degree and reductions to invariant subspaces.