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We develop an alternative formulation of conservative finite difference weighted essentially non-oscillatory (WENO) schemes to solve conservation laws. In this formulation, the WENO interpolation of the solution and its derivatives are used to directly construct the numerical flux, instead of the usual practice of reconstructing the flux functions. Even though this formulation is more expensive than the standard formulation, it does have several advantages. The first advantage is that arbitrary monotone fluxes can be used in this framework, while the traditional practice of reconstructing flux functions can be applied only to smooth flux splitting. The second advantage, which is fully explored in this paper, is that a narrower effective stencil is used compared with previous high order finite difference WENO schemes based on the reconstruction of flux functions, with a Lax-Wendroff time discretization. We will describe the scheme formulation and present numerical tests for one- and two-dimensional scalar and system conservation laws demonstrating the designed high order accuracy and non-oscillatory performance of the schemes constructed in this paper.

The entropy of a hypersurface is a geometric invariant that measures complexity and is invariant under rigid motions and dilations. It is given by the supremum over all Gaussian integrals with varying centers and scales. It is monotone under mean curvature flow, thus giving a Lyapunov functional. Therefore, the entropy of the initial hypersurface bounds the entropy at all future singularities. We show here that not only does the round sphere have the lowest entropy of any closed singularity, but there is a gap to the second lowest.

A basic, simple energy method for the Boltzmann equation is presented here. It is based on a new macromicro decomposition of the Boltzmann equation as well as the H-theorem. This allows us to make use of the ideas from hyperbolic conservation laws and viscous conservation laws to yield the direct energy method. As an illustration, we apply the method for the study of the time-asymptotic, nonlinear stability of the global Maxwellian states. Previous energy method, starting with Grad and finishing with Ukai, involves the spectral analysis and regularity of collision operator through sophisticated weighted norms.

Let $\mathbb {D}\subset \mathbb {C}$ be the unit disk and let $\gamma_{1},\gamma _{2}:[0,T]\to\overline{\mathbb {D}}\setminus\{0\}$ be parametrizations of two slits $\Gamma_{1}:=\gamma(0,T], \Gamma_{2}:=\gamma_{2}(0,T]$ such that $\Gamma_{1}$ and $\Gamma_{2}$ are disjoint.