We propose a fast local level set method for the inverse problem of gravimetry. The theoretical foundation for our approach is based on the following uniqueness result: if an open set D is star-shaped or x₃-convex with respect to its center of gravity, then its exterior potential uniquely determines the open set D. To achieve this purpose constructively, the first challenge is how to parametrize this open set D as its boundary may have a variety of possible shapes. To describe those different shapes we propose to use a level-set function to parametrize the unknown boundary of this open set. The second challenge is how to deal with the issue of partial data as gravimetric measurements are only made on a part of a given reference domain . To overcome this difficulty we propose a linear numerical continuation approach based on the single layer representation to find potentials on the boundary of some artificial domain

It is known that every complex square matrix with nonnega-tive determinant is the product of positive semi-definite matrices. There are characterizations of matrices that require two or five positive semi-definite matrices in the product. However, the characterizations of matrices that require three or four positive semi-definite matrices in the product are lacking. In this paper, we give a complete characterization of these two types of matrices. With these results, we give an algorithm to determine whether a square matrix can be expressed as the product of kpositive semi-definite matrices but not fewer, for k=1, 2, 3, 4, 5.

Numerical encoding plays an important role in DNA sequence analysis via computational methods, in which numerical values are associated with corresponding symbolic characters. After numerical representation, digital signal processing methods can be exploited to analyze DNA sequences. To reflect the biological properties of the original sequence, it is vital that the representation is one-to-one. Chaos Game Representation (CGR) is an iterative mapping technique that assigns each nucleotide in a DNA sequence to a respective position on the plane that allows the depiction of the DNA sequence in the form of image. Using CGR, a biological sequence can be transformed one-to-one to a numerical sequence that preserves the main features of the original sequence. In this research, we propose to encode DNA sequences by considering 2D CGR coordinates as complex numbers, and apply digital signal processing methods to analyze their evolutionary relationship. Computational experiments indicate that this approach gives comparable results to the state-of-the-art multiple sequence alignment method, Clustal Omega, and is significantly faster. The MATLAB code for our method can be accessed from: www.mathworks.com/matlabcentral/fileexchange/57152