The contact discontinuity is one of the basic wave patterns in gas motions. The stability of contact discontinuities with general perturbations for the NavierStokes equations and the Boltzmann equation is a long standing open problem. General perturbations of a contact discontinuity may generate diffusion waves which evolve and interact with the contact wave to cause analytic difficulties. In this paper, we succeed in obtaining the large time asymptotic stability of a contact wave pattern with a convergence rate for the NavierStokes equations and the Boltzmann equation in a uniform way. One of the key observations is that even though the energy norm of the deviation of the solution from the contact wave may grow at the rate (1+ t) 1 4, it can be compensated by the decay in the energy norm of the derivatives of the deviation which is of the order of (1+ t) 1 4. Thus, this reciprocal order of decay rates for the time

We study the periodic homogenization of first order front propagations. Based on PDE methods, we provide a simple proof that, for n ≥ 3, the class of centrally symmetric polytopes with rational coordinates and nonempty interior is admissible as effective fronts, which was also established by I. Babenko and F. Balacheff [Sur la forme de la boule unit\'e de la norme stable unidimensionnelle, Manuscripta Math. 119 (2006) 347--358] and M. Jotz [Hedlund metrics and the stable norm, Diff. Geometry Appl. 27 (2009) 543--550] in the form of stable norms as an extension of G. A. Hedlund's classical result [Geodesics on a two-dimensional Riemannian manifold with periodic coefficients, Ann. Math. 33 (1932) 719--739]. Besides, we obtain the optimal convergence rate of the homogenization problem for this class.

Given a compact Riemannian manifold $M$, we consider a warped product manifold $\bar M = I \times_h M$, where $I$ is an open interval in $\Bbb R$. For a positive function $\psi$ defined on $\bar M$, we generalize the arguments in \cite{GRW2015} and \cite{RW16}, to obtain the curvature estimates for Hessian equations $\sigma_k(\kappa)=\psi(V,\nu(V))$. We also obtain some existence results for the starshaped compact hypersurface $\Sigma$ satisfying the above equation with various assumptions.

In this article, we continue the work in Guan-Li and study a normalized hypersurface flow in the more general ambient setting of warped product spaces. This flow preserves the volume of the bounded domain enclosed by a graphical hypersurface, and monotonically decreases the hypersurface area. As an application, the isoperimetric problem in warped product spaces is solved for such domains.

Based on a global estimate of the heat kernel, some important inequalities such as Poincaré inequality and log-Sobolev inequality, furthermore a tight logarithm Sobolev inequality are presented on graphs, just under a positive curvature condition CDE'(n,K) with some K > 0. As consequences, we obtain exponential integrability of integrable Lipschitz functions and moment bounds at the same assumption on graphs.