The first part of this paper describes some important underlying themes in the mathematical theory of continuum mechanics that are distinct from formulating and analyzing governing equations. The main part of this paper is devoted to a survey of some concrete, conceptually simple, pretty problems that help illuminate the underlying themes. The paper concludes with a discussion of the crucial role of invariant constitutive equations in computation.

We investigate Lamé systems in periodically perforated domains, and establish quantitative homogenization results in the setting where the domain is clamped at the boundary of the holes. Our method is based on layer potentials and it provides a unified proof for various regimes of hole-cell ratios (the ratio between the size of the holes and the size of the periodic cells), and, more importantly, it yields natural correctors that facilitate error estimates. A key ingredient is the asymptotic analysis for the rescaled cell problems, and this is studied by exploring the convergence of the periodic layer potentials for the Lamé system to those in the whole space when the period tends to infinity.

We consider admissible weak solutions to the compressible Euler system with source terms, which include rotating shallow water system and the Euler system with damping as special examples. In the case of anti-symmetric sources such as rotations, for general piecewise Lipschitz initial densities and some suitably constructed initial momentum, we obtain infinitely many global admissible weak solutions. Furthermore, we construct a class of finite-states admissible weak solutions to the Euler system with anti-symmetric sources. Under the additional smallness assumption on the initial densities, we also obtain multiple global-in-time admissible weak solutions for more general sources including damping. The basic framework are based on the convex integration method developed by De~Lellis and Sz\'{e}kelyhidi \cite{dLSz1,dLSz2} for the Euler system. One of the main ingredients of this paper is the construction of specified localized plane wave perturbations which are compatible with a given source term.

The contact discontinuity is one of the basic wave patterns in gas motions. The stability of contact discontinuities with general perturbations for the NavierStokes equations and the Boltzmann equation is a long standing open problem. General perturbations of a contact discontinuity may generate diffusion waves which evolve and interact with the contact wave to cause analytic difficulties. In this paper, we succeed in obtaining the large time asymptotic stability of a contact wave pattern with a convergence rate for the NavierStokes equations and the Boltzmann equation in a uniform way. One of the key observations is that even though the energy norm of the deviation of the solution from the contact wave may grow at the rate (1+ t) 1 4, it can be compensated by the decay in the energy norm of the derivatives of the deviation which is of the order of (1+ t) 1 4. Thus, this reciprocal order of decay rates for the time

For the physical vacuum free boundary problem with the sound speed being C^1/2-Holder continuous near vacuum boundaries of the one-dimensional compressible Euler equations with damping, the global existence of the smooth solution is proved, which is shown to converge to the Barenblatt self-similar solution for the porous media equation with the same total mass when the initial datum is a small perturbation of the Barenblatt solution. The pointwise convergence with a rate of density, the convergence rate of velocity in the supremum norm, and the precise expanding rate of the physical vacuum boundaries are also given. The proof is based on a construction of higher-order weighted functionals with both space and time weights capturing the behavior of solutions both near vacuum states and in large time, an introduction of a new ansatz, higher-order nonlinear energy estimates, and elliptic estimates.

The multi-scale zero relaxation singular limit for gas dynamics in thermal non-equilibrium with multiple non-equilibrium modes in multi-dimensions with physical boundaries from non-equilibrium to thermal equilibrium of compressible Euler flow is proved in this paper for analytical data by establishing the uniform local-in-time estimates. A cancellation mechanism is utilized to deal with the nonlinear singular terms that cause the increase in both time and space derivatives in energy estimates. The rates of the relaxations corresponding to different non-equilibrium modes tending to zero discussed in this paper can be arbitrarily different.

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The general volume of a star body, a notion that includes the usual volume, the $q$th dual volumes, and many previous types of dual mixed volumes, is introduced. A corresponding new general dual Orlicz curvature measure is defined that specializes to the $(p,q)$-dual curvature measures introduced recently by Lutwak, Yang, and Zhang. General variational formulas are established for the general volume of two types of Orlicz linear combinations. One of these is applied to the Minkowski problem for the new general dual Orlicz curvature measure, giving in particular a solution to the Minkowski problem posed by Lutwak, Yang, and Zhang for the $(p,q)$-dual curvature measures when $p>0$ and $q<0$. A dual Orlicz-Brunn-Minkowski inequality for general volumes is obtained, as well as dual Orlicz-Minkowski-type inequalities and uniqueness results for star bodies. Finally, a very general Minkowski-type inequality, involving two Orlicz functions, two convex bodies, and a star body, is proved, that includes as special cases several others in the literature, in particular one due to Lutwak, Yang, and Zhang for the $(p,q)$-mixed volume.

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The spatially homogeneous Boltzmann equation without angular cutoff is discussed on the regularity of solutions for the modified hard potential and Debye-Yukawa potential. When the angular singularity of the cross section is moderate, any weak solution having the finite mass, energy and entropy lies in the Sobolev space of infinite order for any positive time, while for the general potentials, it lies in the Schwartz space if it has moments of arbitrary order. The main ingredients of the proof are the suitable choice of the mollifiers composed of pseudo-differential operators and the sharp estimates of the commutators of the Boltzmann collision operator and pseudo-differential operators. The method developed here also provides some new estimates on the collision operator.