What is the shape of a uniformly massive object that generates a gravitational potential equivalent to that of two equal point-masses? If the weight of each point-mass is sufficiently small compared to the distance between the points then the answer is a pair of balls of equal radius, one centered at each of the two points, but otherwise it is a certain domain of revolution about the axis passing through the two points. The existence and uniqueness of such a domain is known, but an explicit parameterization is known only in the plane where the region is referred to as a Neumann oval. We construct a four-dimensional “Neumann ovaloid”, solving explicitly this inverse potential problem.

In this paper, we study the rate of convergence of the cyclic projection algorithm applied to finitely many basic semialgebraic convex sets. We establish an explicit convergence rate estimate which relies on the maximum degree of the polynomials that generate the basic semialgebraic convex sets and the dimension of the underlying space. We achieve our results by exploiting the algebraic structure of the basic semialgebraic convex sets.

We are concerned with the convergence of Lax-Wendroff type schemes with high resolution to the entropy solutions for conservation laws. These schemes include the original Lax-Wendroff scheme proposed by Lax and Wendroff in 1960 and its two step versions–the Richtmyer scheme and the MacCormack scheme. For the convex scalar conservation laws with algebraic growth flux functions, we prove the convergence of these schemes to the weak solutions satisfying appropriate entropy inequalities. The proof is based on detailed L p estimates of the approximate solutions, H −1 compactness estimates of the corresponding entropy dissipation measures, and some compensated compactness frameworks. Then these techniques are generalized to study the convergence problem for the nonconvex scalar case and the hyperbolic systems of conservation

Since 2000, the study of metamaterial has been a very hot topic due to its potential applications in many areas such as design of invisibility cloak and sub-wavelength imaging. Although several metamaterial models are often used by physicists and engineers, the study of their mathematical properties has lagged behind. In this paper, we initiate our investigation in the plasma-Lorentz model. More specifically, we first discuss the well-posedness of this model, then develop two fully-discrete finite element methods for solving it. Detailed stability and error analysis are carried out, and 3-D numerical results justifying our theoretical analysis are presented.

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