A new method for computation of the fundamental solution of electrodynamics for general anisotropic nondispersive materials is suggested. It consists of several steps: equations for each column of the fundamental matrix are reduced to a symmetric hyperbolic system; using the Fourier transform with respect to space variables and matrix transformations, formulae for Fourier images of the fundamental matrix columns are obtained; finally, the fundamental solution is computed by the inverse Fourier transform....

The least Steklov eigenvalue d1 for the biharmonic operator in bounded domains gives a bound for the positivity preserving property for the hinged plate problem, appears as a norm of a suitable trace operator, and gives the optimal constant to estimate the L2-norm of harmonic functions. These applications suggest to address the problem of minimizing d1 in suitable classes of domains. We survey the existing results and conjectures about this topic; in particular, the existence of a convex domain...