In this paper, the local well-posedness of strong solutions to the Cauchy problem of the isentropic compressible Navier-Stokes equations is proved with the initial date being allowed to have vacuum. The main contribution of this paper is that the well-posedness is established without assuming any compatibility condition on the initial data, which was widely used before in many literatures concerning the well-posedness of compressible Navier-Stokes equations in the presence of vacuum.

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.

In this paper, we study a new class of fractional partial differential equations which are obtained by minimizing variational problems in fractional Sobolev spaces. We introduce a notion of fractional gradient which has the potential to extend to many classical results in the Sobolev spaces to the nonlocal and fractional setting in a natural way.

A new augmented method is proposed for elliptic interface problems with a piecewise variable coefficient that has a finite jump across a smooth interface. The main motivation is to get not only a second order accurate solution but also a second order accurate gradient from each side of the interface. Key to the new method is introducing the jump in the normal derivative of the solution as an augmented variable and rewriting the interface problem as a new PDE that consists of a leading Laplacian operator plus lower order derivative terms near the interface. In this way, the leading second order derivative jump relations are independent of the jump in the coefficient that appears only in the lower order terms after the scaling. An upwind type discretization is used for the finite difference discretization at the irregular grid points on or near the interface so that the resulting coefficient matrix is an M-matrix. A multigrid solver is used to solve the linear system of equations, and the GMRES iterative method is used to solve the augmented variable. Second order convergence for the solution and the gradient from each side of the interface is proved in this paper. Numerical examples for general elliptic interface problems confirm the theoretical analysis and efficiency of the new method.

This paper resolves a number of problems in the perturbation theory of linear operators, linked with the 45-year-old conjecure of M. G. Kreĭn. In particular, we prove that every Lipschitz function is operator-Lipschitz in the Schatten–von Neumann ideals$S$^{$α$}, 1 <$α$< ∞. Alternatively, for every 1 <$α$< ∞, there is a constant$c$_{$α$}> 0 such that $$ {\left\| {f(a) - f(b)} \right\|_{\alpha }} \leqslant {c_{\alpha }}{\left\| f \right\|_{{{\text{Lip}}\,{1}}}}{\left\| {a - b} \right\|_{\alpha }}, $$ where$f$is a Lipschitz function with $$ {\left\| f \right\|_{{{\text{Lip}}\,{1}}}}: = \mathop{{\sup }}\limits_{{_{{\lambda \ne \mu }}^{{\lambda, \mu \in \mathbb{R}}}}} \left| {\frac{{f\left( \lambda \right) - f\left( \mu \right)}}{{\lambda - \mu }}} \right| < \infty, $$ $$ {\left\| \cdot \right\|_{\alpha }} $$ is the norm is$S$^{$α$}, and$a$and$b$are self-adjoint linear operators such that $$ a - b \in {S^{\alpha }} $$ .