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.

This paper investigates the generalized Keller-Segel (KS) system with a nonlocal diffusion term -ν(-Δ) α/2 ρ (1 < α < 2). Firstly, the global existence of weak solutions is proved for the initial density ρ0 ∈ L01∩L d/α (60d) (d ≥ 2) with [norm of matrix]ρ0[norm of matrix] d/α < K, where K is a universal constant only depending on d, α, ν. Moreover, the conservation of mass holds true and the weak solution satisfies some hyper-contractive and decay estimates in Lr for any 1 < r < ∞. Secondly, for the more general initial data ρ0 ∈ L01 ∩ L05(60d) (d = 2, 3), the local existence is obtained. Thirdly, for ρ0 ∈ L01 (60d; (1 + |x|)dx ∩ L∞(60d)( d ≥ 2) with [norm of matrix]ρ0[norm of matrix]d/α < K, we prove the uniqueness and stability of weak solutions under Wasserstein metric through the method of associating the KS equation with a self-consistent stochastic process driven by the rotationally invariant α-stable Lévy process Lα(t). Also, we prove the weak solution is L1 bounded uniformly in time. Lastly, we consider the N-particle interacting system with the Lévy process Lα(t) and the Newtonian potential aggregation and prove that the expectation of collision time between particles is below a universal constant if the moment ∫60d |x| γρ0dx for some 1 < γ < α is below a universal constant K γ and ν is also below a universal constant. Meanwhile, we prove the propagation of chaos as N → ∞ for the interacting particle system with a cut-off parameter ε ~ (ln N)-1/d, and show that the mean field limit equation is exactly the generalized KS equation.

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.

Let $f(x)=\sum_{n=0}^{\infty}\frac{1}{n!}q^{n(n-1)/2}x^n$ ($0<q<1$) be the deformed exponential function. It is known that the zeros of $f(x)$ are real and form a negative decreasing sequence $(x_k)$ ($k\ge 1$). We investigate the complete asymptotic expansion for $x_{k}$ and prove that for any $n\ge1$, as $k\to \infty$, \begin{align*} x_k=-kq^{1-k}\Big(1+\sum_{i=1}^{n}C_i(q)k^{-1-i}+o(k^{-1-n})\Big), \end{align*} where $C_i(q)$ are some $q$ series which can be determined recursively. We show that each $C_{i}(q)\in \mathbb{Q}[A_0,A_1,A_2]$, where $A_{i}=\sum_{m=1}^{\infty}m^i\sigma(m)q^m$ and $\sigma(m)$ denotes the sum of positive divisors of $m$. When writing $C_{i}$ as a polynomial in $A_0, A_1$ and $A_2$, we find explicit formulas for the coefficients of the linear terms by using Bernoulli numbers. Moreover, we also prove that $C_{i}(q)\in \mathbb{Q}[E_2,E_4,E_6]$, where $E_2$, $E_4$ and $E_6$ are the classical Eisenstein series of weight 2, 4 and 6, respectively.

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.