Nondegeneracy of elliptic problems with periodic nonlinearities in the plane

A class of asymptotically quadratic functionals on Hilbert spaces, called degenerate, is considered and explored. Our results are applied to obtain a extension, in the planar case, of a result published by Solimini in ‘On the solvability of some elliptic partial differential equations with the linear part at resonance’, J. Math. Anal. Appl., 117 (1986), 138-152. Similar extensions had been previously studied in the literature only for domains with particular geometries.