In this article, we consider the time-dependent Maxwell’s equations modeling wave propagation in metamaterials. One-order higher global superclose results in the L2 norm are proved for several semidiscrete and fully discrete schemes developed for solving this model using nonuniform cubic and rectangular edge elements. Furthermore, L ∞ superconvergence at element centers is proved for the lowest order rectangular edge element. To our best knowledge, such pointwise superconvergence result and its proof are original, and we are unaware of any other publications on this issue.

Recently, Tsai-Tseng-Yau constructed new invariants of symplectic manifolds: a sequence of A-infinity algebras built of differential forms on the symplectic manifold. We show that these symplectic A-infinity algebras have a simple topological interpretation. Namely, when the cohomology class of the symplectic form is integral, these A-infinity algebras are equivalent to the standard de Rham differential graded algebra on certain odd dimensional sphere bundles over the symplectic manifold. From this equivalence, we deduce for a closed symplectic manifold that Tsai-Tseng-Yau's symplectic A-infinity algebras satisfy the Calabi-Yau property, and importantly, that they can be used to define an intersection theory for coisotropic/isotropic chains. We further demonstrate that these symplectic A-infinity algebras satisfy several functorial properties and lay the groundwork for addressing Weinstein functoriality and invariance in the smooth category.

This paper studies the dynamics of a network-based SIS epidemic model with nonmonotone incidence rate. This type of nonlinear incidence can be used to describe the psychological effect of certain diseases spread in a contact network at high infective levels. We first find a threshold value for the transmission rate. This value completely determines the dynamics of the model and interestingly, the threshold is not dependent on the functional form of the nonlinear incidence rate. Furthermore, if the transmission rate is less than or equal to the threshold value, the disease will die out. Otherwise, it will be permanent. Numerical experiments are given to illustrate the theoretical results. We also consider the effect of the nonlinear incidence on the epidemic dynamics.

In this paper, we propose a novel iterative convolution-thresholding method (ICTM) that is applicable to a range of variational models for image segmentation. A variational model usually minimizes an energy functional consisting of a fidelity term and a regularization term. In the ICTM, the interface between two different segment domains is implicitly represented by their characteristic functions. The fidelity term is usually written as a linear functional of the characteristic functions and the regularized term is approximated by a functional of characteristic functions in terms of heat kernel convolution. This allows us to design an iterative convolution-thresholding method to minimize the approximate energy. The method is simple, efficient and enjoys the energy-decaying property. Numerical experiments show that the method is easy to implement, robust and applicable to various image segmentation models.

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