We consider the spatially inhomogeneous Boltzmann equation without angular cutoff. We prove the existence and uniqueness of local classical solutions to the Cauchy problem, in the function space with Maxwellian type exponential decay with respect to the velocity variable. <b><i>To cite this article: R. Alexandre et al., C. R. Acad. Sci. Paris, Ser. I 347 (2009).</i></b>

We develop a new moving-water equilibria preserving numerical scheme for the Saint-Venant system. The new scheme is designed in two major steps. First, the geometric source term is incorporated into the discharge flux, which results in a hyperbolic system with a global flux. Second, the discharge equation is relaxed so that the nonlinearity is moved into the stiff right-hand side of the added auxiliary equation. The main advantages of the new scheme are that (i) no special treatment of the geometric source term is required, and (ii) no nonlinear (cubic) equations should be solved to obtain the point values of the water depth out of the reconstructed equilibrium variables, as it must be done in the existing alternative methods. We also develop a hybrid numerical flux, which helps to handle various flow regimes in a stable manner. Several numerical experiments are performed to verify that the proposed scheme is capable of exactly preserving general moving-water steady states and accurately capturing their small perturbations.

There have been many attempts to define quasilocal energy/mass for a spacelike 2-surface in a spacetime by the Hamilton–Jacobi method. The main difficulty in this approach is the subtle choice of the background configuration to be subtracted from the physical Hamiltonian. Quasilocal mass should be positive for general surfaces, but on the other hand should be zero for surfaces in the flat spacetime. In this paper, we survey the work in a series of papers [6, 25–27] in which a new notion of quasilocal mass/energy–momentum is proposed and investigated. In particular, the notion of energy observed by a 'quasilocal observer' will be discussed.

Given a negatively curved geodesic metric space M, we study the almost sure asymptotic penetration behavior of (locally) geodesic lines of M into small neighborhoods of points, of closed geodesics, and of other compact (locally) convex subsets of M. We prove Khintchine-type and logarithm law-type results for the spiraling of geodesic lines around these objets. As a consequence in the tree setting, we obtain Diophantine approximation results of elements of non-archimedian local fields by quadratic irrational ones.

We prove that the higher harmonic signature of an even dimensional oriented Riemannian foliation F of a compact Riemannian manifold M with coefficients in a leafwise U(p, q)-flat complex bundle is a leafwise homotopy invariant. We also prove the leafwise homotopy invariance of the twisted higher Betti classes. Consequences for the Novikov conjecture for foliations and for groups are investigated.