We derive large time upper bounds for heat kernels on vector bundles of differential forms on a class of non-compact Riemannian manifolds under certain curvature conditions.

We study geodesics in the random metric space called the Brownian map, which appears as the scaling limit of large planar maps. In particular, we completely describe geodesics starting from the distinguished point called the root, and we characterize the set$S$of all points that are connected to the root by more than one geodesic. The set$S$is dense in the Brownian map and homeomorphic to a non-compact real tree. Furthermore, for every$x$in$S$, the number of distinct geodesics from x to the root is equal to the number of connected components of$S$\{$x$}. In particular, points of the Brownian map can be connected to the root by at most three distinct geodesics. Our results have applications to the behavior of geodesics in large planar maps.

We construct a virus database called VirusDB (http://yaulab.math.tsinghua.edu.cn/VirusDB/) and an online inquiry system to serve people who are interested in viral classification and prediction. The database stores all viral genomes, their corresponding natural vectors, and the classification information of the single/multiple-segmented viral reference sequences downloaded from National Center for Biotechnology Information. The online inquiry system serves the purpose of computing natural vectors and their distances based on submitted genomes, providing an online interface for accessing and using the database for viral classification and prediction, and back-end processes for automatic and manual updating of database content to synchronize with GenBank. Submitted genomes data in FASTA format will be carried out and the prediction results with 5 closest neighbors and their classifications will be returned by email. Considering the one-to-one correspondence between sequence and natural vector, time efficiency, and high accuracy, natural vector is a significant advance compared with alignment methods, which makes VirusDB a useful database in further research.

We introduce a semi-algebraic structure on the set of all isotopy classes of non-separating simple closed curves in any compact oriented surface and show that the structure is finitely generated. As a consequence, we produce a natural finite dimensional linear representation of the mapping class group of the surface. Applications to the Teichmller space, Thurston's measured lamination space, the harmonic Beltrami differentials, and the first cohomology groups of the surface are discussed.

In this paper, we discuss high order finite difference weighted essentially non-oscillatory (WENO) schemes, coupled with total variation diminishing (TVD) Runge-Kutta (RK) temporal integration, for solving the semilinear hyperbolic system of a correlated random walk model describing movement of animals and cells in biology. Since the solutions to this system are non-negative, we discuss a positivity-preserving limiter without compromising accuracy. Analysis is performed to justify the maintanance of third order spatial / temporal accuracy when the limiters are applied to a third order finite difference scheme and third order TVD-RK time discretization for solving this model. Numerical results are also provided to demonstrate these methods up to fifth order accuracy.