Acta Applicandae Mathematicae

The Vinogradov C-spectral sequence for the Yang–Mills equations is considered and the ‘three-line’ theorem for the term E1 of the C-spectral sequence is proved: E1 p,q = 0 if p > 0 and q < n − 2, where n is the dimension of spacetime.

We investigate symmetry techniques for expressing various exterior differential forms in terms of simplified coordinate systems. In particular, we give extensions of the Lie symmetry approach to integrating Frobenius integrable distributions based on a solvable structure of symmetries and show how a solvable structure of symmetries may be used to find local coordinates for the Pfaffian problem and Darboux's theorem.

We study multiphase solutions of the Whitham equations. The Whitham equations describe the zero dispersion limit of the Cauchy problem for the Korteweg—de Vries (KdV) equation. The zero dispersion solution of the KdV equation is determined by the Lax—Levermore minimization problem. The minimizer is a measurable function on the real line. When the support of the minimizer consists of a finite number of disjoint intervals to be determined, the minimization problem can be reduced to a scalar Riemann Hilbert (RH) problem. For each fixed x and t ≥ 0, the end-points of the contour are determined by the solution of the Whitham equations. The Lax—Levermore minimizer and the solution of the Whitham equations are described in terms of a kernel related to the Bergman kernel. At t = 0 the support of the minimizer consists of one interval for any value of x, while for t > 0, the number of intervals is larger than one in some regions of the (x,t) plane where the multiphase solutions of the Whitham equations develop. The increase of the number of intervals happens whenever the solution of the Whitham equations has a point of gradient catastrophe. For a class of smooth monotonically increasing initial data, we show that the support of the Lax—Levermore minimizer increases or decreases the number of its intervals by one near each point of gradient catastrophe. This result justifies the formation and extinction of the multiphase solutions of the Whitham equations. Furthermore we characterize a class of initial data for which all the points of gradient catastrophe occur only a finite number of times and therefore the support of the Lax—Levermore minimizer consists of a finite number of disjoint intervals for any x and t ≥ 0. This corresponds to give an upper bound to the genus of the solution of the Whitham equations. Similar results are obtained for the semi-classical limit of the defocusing nonlinear Schrödinger equation.

We analyze the notion of reproducing pair of weakly measurable functions, which generalizes that of continuous frame. We show, in particular, that each reproducing pair generates two Hilbert spaces, conjugate dual to each other. Several examples, both discrete and continuous, are presented.

For a regular jointly measurable Markov semigroup on the space of finite Borel measures on a Polish space we give a Yosida-type decomposition of the state space, which yields a parametrisation of the ergodic probability measures associated to this semigroup in terms of subsets of the state space. In this way we extend results by Costa and Dufour (J. Appl. Probab. 43:767–781, 2006). As a consequence we obtain an integral decomposition of every invariant probability measure in terms of the ergodic probability measures. Our approach is completely centered around the reduction to and relationship with the case of a single regular Markov operator associated to the Markov semigroup, the resolvent operator, which enables us to fully exploit results in that situation (Worm and Hille in Ergod. Theory Dyn. Syst. 31(2):571–597, 2011).

The Wiener index is one of the main descriptors that correlate a chemical compound’s molecular graph with experimentally gathered data regarding the compound’s characteristics. A long standing conjecture on the Wiener index ([4, 5]) states that for any positive integer $n$ (except numbers from a given 49 element set), one can find a tree with Wiener index $n$ . In this paper, we prove that every integer $n>10^8$ is the Wiener index of some short caterpillar tree with at most six non-leaf vertices. The Wiener index conjecture for trees then follows from this and the computational results in [8] and [5].

This paper concerns an optimal stopping problem driven by the running maximum of a spectrally negative Lévy process X. More precisely, we are interested in capped versions of the American lookback optimal stopping problem (Gapeev in J. Appl. Probab. 44:713–731, 2007; Guo and Shepp in J. Appl. Probab. 38:647–658, 2001; Pedersen in J. Appl. Probab. 37:972–983, 2000), which has its origins in mathematical finance, and provide semi-explicit solutions in terms of scale functions. The optimal stopping boundary is characterised by an ordinary first-order differential equation involving scale functions and, in particular, changes according to the path variation of X. Furthermore, we will link these capped problems to Peskir’s maximality principle (Peskir in Ann. Probab. 26:1614–1640, 1998).

The mathematical model is proposed to simulate the dynamics of rabies transmissions in the raccoon population where juveniles stay with their mother and become adults until they establish their own habitats. The basic reproduction number of rabies transmission is formulated and is shown to be a threshold value of disease invasion. The bifurcation direction from the disease-free equilibrium is proved to be forward when the basic reproduction number passes through unity for spatial homogenous environment. The global stability of the disease-free steady state is also studied.