The summability of solutions to variational problems since Guido Stampacchia.
Inequalities concerning the integral of |∇u|2 on the subsets where |u(x)| is greater than k can be used in order to prove regularity properties of the function u. This method was introduced by Ennio De Giorgi e Guido Stampacchia for the study of the regularity of the solutions of Dirichlet problems.