We prove that for nonlinear elastic energies with strong enough energetic control of the outer distortion of admissible deformations, almost everywhere global invertibility as constraint can be obtained in the $\Gamma$-limit of the elastic energy with an added nonlocal self-repulsion term with asymptocially vanishing coefficient. The self-repulsion term considered here formally coincides with a Sobolev–Slobodeckiĭ seminorm of the inverse deformation. Variants near the boundary or on the surface of the domain are also studied.

It is known that a polynomial local diffeomorphism $(f,\, g): {\mathbb {R}}^{2} \to {\mathbb {R}}^{2}$ is a global diffeomorphism provided the higher homogeneous terms of $f f_x+g g_x$ and $f f_y+g g_y$ do not have real linear factors in common. Here, we give a weight-homogeneous framework of this result. Our approach uses qualitative theory of differential equations. In our reasoning, we obtain a result on polynomial Hamiltonian vector fields in the plane, generalization of a known fact.

We obtain a new theorem for the non-properness set $S_f$ of a non-singular polynomial mapping $f:\mathbb C^n \to \mathbb C^n$. In particular, our result shows that if f is a counterexample to the Jacobian conjecture, then $S_f\cap Z \neq \emptyset $, for every hypersurface Z dominated by $\mathbb C^{n-1}$ on which some non-singular polynomial $h: \mathbb C^{n}\to \mathbb C$ is constant. Also, we present topological approaches to the Jacobian conjecture in $\mathbb C^n$. As applications, we extend bidimensional results of Rabier, Lê and Weber to higher dimensions.