In this paper we prove several formulae that enable one to capture the singular portion of the measure derivative of a function of bounded variation as a limit of non-local functionals. One special case shows that rescalings of the fractional Laplacian of a function $u \in SBV$ converge strictly to the singular portion of $Du$.

Consider an age-dependent, single-species branching process defined by a progeny number distribution, and a lifetime distribution associated with each independent particle. In this paper, we focus on the associated inverse problem where one wishes to formally solve for the progeny number distribution or the lifetime distribution that defines the Bellman-Harris branching process. We derive results for the existence and uniqueness (the identifiability) of these two distributions given one of two types of information: the extinction time probability of the entire process (extinction time distribution), or the distribution of the total number of particles at one fixed time. We demonstrate that perfect knowledge of the distribution of extinction times allows us to formally determine either the progeny number distribution or the lifetime distribution. Furthermore, we show that these constructions are unique. We then consider “data” consisting of a perfectly known total number distribution given at one specific time. For a process with known progeny number distribution and exponentially distributed lifetimes, we show that the rate parameter is identifiable. For general lifetime distributions, we also show that the progeny distribution is globally unique. Our results are presented through four theorems, each describing the constructions in the four distinct cases.

We study the decay of approximation numbers of compact composition operators on the Dirichlet space. We give upper and lower bounds for these numbers. In particular, we improve on a result of El-Fallah, Kellay, Shabankhah and Youssfi, on the set of contact points with the unit circle of a compact symbolic composition operator acting on the Dirichlet space $\mathcal{D}$ . We extend their results in two directions: first, the contact only takes place at the point 1. Moreover, the approximation numbers of the operator can be arbitrarily subexponentially small.

This paper deals with the moment problem on a (not necessarily finitely generated) commutative unital real algebra A. We define moment functionals on A as linear functionals which can be written as integrals over characters of A with respect to cylinder measures. Our main results provide such integral representations for A+–positive linear functionals (generalized Haviland theorem) and for positive functionals fulfilling Carleman conditions. As an application, we solve the moment problem for the symmetric algebra S(V) of a real vector space V. As a byproduct, we obtain new approaches to the moment problem on S(V) for a nuclear space V and to the integral decomposition of continuous positive functionals on a barrelled nuclear topological algebra A.

In this work we introduce a formulation for a non-local Hessian that combines the ideas of higher-order and non-local regularization for image restoration, extending the idea of non-local gradients to higher-order derivatives. By carefully choosing the weights, the model allows to improve on the current state of the art higher-order method, Total Generalized Variation, with respect to overall quality and particularly close to jumps in the data. In the spirit of recent work by Brezis et al., our formulation also has analytic implications: for a suitable choice of weights, it can be shown to converge to classical second-order regularizers, and in fact allows a novel characterization of higher-order Sobolev and BV spaces.