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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.

We study linear and nonlinear Schrodinger equations defined by fractal measures. Under the assumption that the Laplacian has compact resolvent, we prove that there exists a uniqueness weak solution for a linear Schrodinger equation, and then use it to obtain the existence and uniqueness of weak solution of a nonlinear Schrodinger equation. We prove that for a class of self-similar measures on R with overlaps, the Schrodinger equations can be discretized so that the finite element method can be applied to obtain approximate solutions. We also prove that the numerical solutions converge to the actual solution and obtain the rate of convergence.

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.

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