In functional analysis, a subfield of mathematics, Kato's inequality is a distributional inequality for the Laplace operator or certain elliptic operators. It was proven in 1972 by the Japanese mathematician Tosio Kato.

The original inequality is for some degenerate elliptic operators. This article treats the special (but important) case for the Laplace operator.

Inequality for the Laplace operator Let be a bounded and open set, and such that . Then the following holds in ,

where

is the space of locally integrable functions – i.e., functions that are integrable on every compact subset of their domains of definition.

Remarks Sometimes the inequality is stated in the form in where and is the indicator function. If is continuous in then in .

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