We establish the variational principle of Kolmogorov-Petrovsky-Piskunov (KPP) front speeds in temporally random shear flows with sufficiently decaying correlations. A key quantity in the variational principle is the almost sure Lyapunov exponent of a heat operator with random potential. To prove the variational principle, we use the comparison principle of solutions, the path integral representation of solutions, and large deviation estimates of the associated stochastic flows. The variational principle then allows us to analytically bound the front speeds. The speed bounds imply the linear growth law in the regime of large root mean square shear amplitude at any fixed temporal correlation length, and the sublinear growth law if the temporal decorrelation is also large enough, the so-called bending phenomenon.

We study detecting a boundary corrosion damage in the inaccessible part of a rectangular shaped electrostatic conductor from a one set of Cauchy data specied on an accessible boundary part of conductor. For this nonlinear ill-posed problem, we prove the uniqueness in a very general framework. Then we establish the conditional stability of Holder type based on some a priori assumptions on the unknown impedance and the electrical current input specied in the accessible part. Finally a regularizing scheme of double regularizing parameters, using the truncation of the series expansion of the solution, is proposed with the convergence analysis on the explicit regularizing solution in terms of a practical average norm for measurement data.

For the class of graph-directed self-similar measures on R, which could have overlaps but are essentially of finite type, we set up a framework for deriving a closed formula for the spectral dimension of the Laplacians defined by these measures. For the class of finitely ramified graph-directed self-similar sets, the spectral dimension of the associated Laplace operators has been obtained by Hambly and Nyberg [6]. The main novelty of our results is that the graph-directed self-similar measures we consider do not need to satisfy the graph open set condition.

In this note, we consider regularity theory for a fractional p-Laplace operator which arises in the complex interpolation of the Sobolev spaces, the Hs,p-Laplacian. We obtain the natural analogue to the classical p-Laplacian situation, namely Cs+αloc-regularity for the homogeneous equation.

We study the convergence rate of Glimm scheme for general systems of hyperbolic conservation laws without the assumption that each characteristic field is either genuinely nonlinear or linearly degenerate. We first give a sharper estimate of the error arising from the wave tracing argument by a careful analysis of the interaction between small waves. With this key estimate, the convergence rate is shown to be o (1) s 1 3| ln s| 1+ , which is sharper compared to o (1) s 1 4| ln s| given in [T. Yang, Convergence rate of Glimm scheme for general systems of hyperbolic conservation laws, Taiwanese J. Math. 7 (2)(2003) 195205]. However, it is still slower than o (1) s 1 2| ln s| given in [A. Bressan, A. Marson, Error bounds for a deterministic version of the Glimm scheme, Arch. Ration. Mech. Anal. 142 (2)(1998) 155176] for systems with each characteristic field being genuinely nonlinear or linearly degenerate. Here s is the