A review is presented of recent results on front propagation in reaction-diffusion-advection equations in homogeneous and heterogeneous media. Formal asymptotic expansions and heuristic ideas are used to motivate the results wherever possible. The fronts include constant-speed monotone traveling fronts in homogeneous media, periodically varying traveling fronts in periodic media, and fluctuating and fractal fronts in random media. These fronts arise in a wide range of applications such as chemical kinetics, combustion, biology, transport in porous media, and industrial deposition processes. Open problems are briefly discussed along the way.

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During the past year a group of 12 graduate students, a visiting researcher and a postdoctoral fellow, supported in part by this contract, have studied various nonlinear partial differential equations. Seminars were held twice weekly on the topic of soliton theory. The graduate students involved have been studying the problem of singularity that arises in nonlinear equations.

For a bipolar hydrodynamic model of semiconductors in the form of EulerPoisson equations with Dirichlet or Neumann boundary conditions, in this paper we first heuristically analyze the most probable asymptotic profile (the so-called diffusion waves) and then prove this long-time behavior rigorously. For this, we construct correction functions to show the convergence of the original solution to the diffusion wave with optimal convergence rates by the energy method. Moreover, in the case with Dirichlet boundary condition, when the initial perturbation is in some weighted L^1 space, a faster and optimal convergence rate is also given.

We study the averaged behavior of interfaces moving with oscillatory normal velocity that is periodic in time and stationary ergodic in space. This problem can be interpreted as a homogenization problem of a Hamilton-Jacobi equation with a positively homogeneous and time dependent Hamiltonian. In an earlier work, we studied the setting when the environment is periodic in space and random in time, and established homogenization results through the averaging of reachable sets. In the present setting, we show that the minimal travel time between two spatial points, which now depends also on a starting time, has a deterministic averaging limit that is independent of the starting time. This averaged travel time function is then shown to determine the effective behavior of the moving interfaces.