Georgia Institute of Technology College of Sciences

This is a joint work with Piermarco Cannarsa and Wei Cheng. We study the properties of the set S of non-differentiable points of viscosity solutions of the Hamilton-Jacobi equation, for a Tonelli Hamiltonian. The main surprise is the fact that this set is locally arc connected—it is even locally contractible. This last property is far from generic in the class of semi-concave functions. We also “identify” the connected components of this set S. This work relies on the idea of Cannarsa and Cheng to use the positive Lax-Oleinik operator to construct a global propagation of singularities (without necessarily obtaining uniqueness of the propagation).