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This work is devoted to establishing the local-in-time well-posedness of strong solutions to the three-dimensional compressible primitive equations of atmospheric dynamics. It is shown that strong solutions exist, unique, and depend continuously on the initial data, for a short time in two cases: with gravity but without vacuum, and with vacuum but without gravity. We also introduce the free boundary problem for the compressible primitive equations.

The hydrodynamic limit for the Boltzmann equation is studied in the case when the limit system, that is, the system of Euler equations contains contact discontinuities. When suitable initial data is chosen to avoid the initial layer, we prove that there exist a family of solutions to the Boltzmann equation globally in time for small Knudsen number. And this family of solutions converge to the local Maxwellian defined by the contact discontinuity of the Euler equations uniformly away from the discontinuity as the Knudsen number <i></i> tends to zero. The proof is obtained by an appropriately chosen scaling and the energy method through the micro-macro decomposition.

We investigate the long-time dynamics of an opinion formation model inspired by a work by Borghesi, Bouchaud and Jensen. First, we derive a Fokker–Planck-type equation under the assumption that interactions between individuals produce little consensus of opinion (grazing collision approximation). Second, we study conditions under which the Fokker–Planck equation has non-trivial equilibria and derive the macroscopic limit (corresponding to the long-time dynamics and spatially localized interactions) for the evolution of the mean opinion. Finally, we compare two different types of interaction rates: the original one given in the work of Borghesi, Bouchaud and Jensen (symmetric binary interactions) and one inspired from works by Motsch and Tadmor (non-symmetric binary interactions). We show that the first case leads to a conservative model for the density of the mean opinion whereas the second case leads to a non-conservative equation. We also show that the speed at which consensus is reached asymptotically for these two rates has fairly different density dependence.

In this paper, we establish the existence theory for general system of hyperbolic conservation laws and obtain the uniform <i>L</i> _<i>1</i> boundness for the solutions. The existence theory generalizes the classical Glimm theory for systems, for which each characteristic field is either genuinely nonlinear or linearly degenerate in the sense of Lax. We construct the solutions by the Glimm scheme through the wave tracing method. One of the key elements is a new way of measuring the potential interaction of the waves of the same characteristic family involving the angle between waves. A new analysis is introduced to verify the consistency of the wave tracing procedure. The entropy functional is used to study the <i>L</i> _<i>1</i> boundedness.