This paper concerns the well-posedness theory of the motion of a physical vacuum for the compressible Euler equations with or without self-gravitation. First, a general uniqueness theorem of classical solutions is proved for the three dimensional general motion. Second, for the spherically symmetric motions, without imposing the compatibility condition of the first derivative being zero at the center of symmetry, a new local-in-time existence theory is established in a functional space involving less derivatives than those constructed for three-dimensional motions in (Coutand et al., Commun Math Phys 296:559–587, 2010; Coutand and Shkoller, Arch Ration Mech Anal 206:515–616, 2012; Jang andMasmoudi,Well-posedness of compressible Euler equations in a physical vacuum, 2008) by constructing suitable weights and cutoff functions featuring the behavior of solutions near both the center of the symmetry and the moving vacuum boundary.

We set up a framework to study one-dimensional heat equations defined by fractal Laplacians associated with self-similar measures with overlaps. We show that for a class of such self-similar measures, a heat equation can be discretized and the finite element method can be applied to yield a system of linear differential equations. We show that the numerical solutions converge to the actual solution and obtain the rate of convergence. We also study some properties of the solutions of the heat equation.

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In this paper, we initiate the study of the instability of naked singularities without symmetries. In a series of papers, Christodoulou proved that naked singularities are not stable in the context of the spherically symmetric Einstein equations coupled with a massless scalar field. We study in this paper the next simplest case: a characteristic initial value problem of this coupled system with the initial data given on two intersecting null cones, the incoming one of which is assumed to be spherically symmetric and singular at its vertex, and the outgoing one of which has no symmetries. It is shown that, arbitrarily fixing the initial scalar field, the set of the initial conformal metrics on the outgoing null cone such that the maximal future development does not have any sequences of closed trapped surfaces approaching the singularity, is of first category in the whole space in which the shear tensors are continuous. Such a set can then be viewed as exceptional, although the exceptionality is weaker than the at least 1 co-dimensionality in spherical symmetry. Almost equivalently, it is also proved that, arbitrarily fixing an incoming null cone C––ε to the future of the initial incoming null cone, the set of the initial conformal metrics such that the maximal future development has at least one closed trapped surface before C––ε, contains an open and dense subset of the whole space. Since the initial scalar field can be chosen such that the singularity is naked if the initial shear is set to be zero, we may say that the spherical naked singularities of a self-gravitating scalar field are not stable under gravitational perturbations. This in particular gives new families of non-spherically symmetric gravitational perturbations different from the original spherically symmetric scalar perturbations given by Christodoulou.

We prove that weak solutions to the obstacle problem for the porous medium equation are locally Hölder continuous, provided that the obstacle is Hölder continuous.

The aim of this paper is to provide a fast and efficient procedure for (real-time) target identification in imaging based on matching on a dictionary of precomputed generalized polarization tensors (GPTs). The approach is based on some important properties of the GPTs and new invariants. A new shape representation is given and numerically tested in the presence of measurement noise. The stability and resolution of the proposed identification algorithm is numerically quantified. We compare the proposed GPT-based shape representation with a moment-based one.

In this paper we consider the initial-boundary value problem to the one-dimensional compressible Navier{Stokes equations for ideal gases. Both the viscous and heat conductive coeffcients are assumed to be positive constants, and the initial density is allowed to have vacuum. Global existence and uniqueness of strong solutions is established for any H2 initial data, which generalizes the well-known result of Kazhikhov and Shelukhin [J. Appl. Math. Mech., 41 (1977), pp. 273{282] to the case that with nonnegative initial density. An observation to overcome the diculty caused by the lack of the positive lower bound of the density is that the ratio of the density to its initial value is inversely proportional to the time integral of the upper bound of the temperature along the trajectory.

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.

We study the averaged behavior of interfaces moving with oscillatory normal velocity that is periodic in time and stationary ergodic in space. This problem can be interpreted as a homogenization problem of a Hamilton-Jacobi equation with a positively homogeneous and time dependent Hamiltonian. In an earlier work, we studied the setting when the environment is periodic in space and random in time, and established homogenization results through the averaging of reachable sets. In the present setting, we show that the minimal travel time between two spatial points, which now depends also on a starting time, has a deterministic averaging limit that is independent of the starting time. This averaged travel time function is then shown to determine the effective behavior of the moving interfaces.

During the past year a group of 12 graduate students, a visiting researcher and a postdoctoral fellow, supported in part by this contract, have studied various nonlinear partial differential equations. Seminars were held twice weekly on the topic of soliton theory. The graduate students involved have been studying the problem of singularity that arises in nonlinear equations.