Seminars and Colloquia by Series

The surface quasi-geostrophic equation and its generalizations.

Series
PDE Seminar
Time
Tuesday, February 7, 2012 - 15:05 for 1 hour (actually 50 minutes)
Location
Skiles 005
Speaker
Jiahong Wu – Oklahoma State University
Fundamental issues such as the global regularity problem concerning the surface quasi-geostrophic (SQG) and related equations have attracted a lot of attention recently. Significant progress has been made in the last few years. This talk summarizes some current results on the critical and supercritical SQG equations and presents very recent work on the generalized SQG equations. These generalized equations are active scalar equations with the velocity fields determined by the scalars through general Fourier multiplier operators. The SQG equation is a special case of these general models and it corresponds to the Riesz transform. We obtain global regularity for equations with velocity fields logarithmically singular than the 2D Euler and local regularity for equations with velocity fields more singular than those corresponding to the Riesz transform. The results are from recent papers in collaboration with D. Chae and P. Constantin, and with D. Chae, P. Constantin, D. Cordoba and F. Gancedo.

On the stability of Prandtl boundary layers and the inviscid limit of the Navier-Stokes equations.

Series
PDE Seminar
Time
Tuesday, November 22, 2011 - 15:05 for 1 hour (actually 50 minutes)
Location
Skiles 005
Speaker
Toan T. Nguyen – Brown University
In fluid dynamics, one of the most classical issues is to understand the dynamics of viscous fluid flows past solid bodies (e.g., aircrafts, ships, etc...), especially in the regime of very high Reynolds numbers (or small viscosity). Boundary layers are typically formed in a thin layer near the boundary. In this talk, I shall present various ill-posedness results on the classical Prandtl equation, and discuss the relevance of boundary-layer expansions and the vanishing viscosity limit problem of the Navier-Stokes equations. I will also discuss viscosity effects in destabilizing stable inviscid flows.

Regularity and decay estimates of dissipative equations.

Series
PDE Seminar
Time
Tuesday, November 8, 2011 - 15:05 for 1 hour (actually 50 minutes)
Location
Skiles 005
Speaker
Hantaek Bae – University of Maryland
We establish Gevrey class regularity of solutions to dissipative equations. The main tools are the Kato-Ponce inequality for Gevrey estimates in Sobolev spaces and the Gevrey estimates in Besov spaces using the paraproduct decomposition. As an application, we obtain temporal decay of solutions for a large class of equations including the Navier-Stokes equations, the subcritical quasi-geostrophic equations.

Global existence results for water waves

Series
PDE Seminar
Time
Tuesday, November 1, 2011 - 15:05 for 1 hour (actually 50 minutes)
Location
Skiles 005
Speaker
Pierre Germain – New York University, Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences
I will describe results of global existence and scattering for water waves (inviscid, irrotational), in the case of small data. I will examine two physical settings: gravity, but no capillarity; or capillarity, but no gravity. The proofs rely on the space-time resonance method, which I will briefly present. This is joint work with Nader Masmoudi and Jalal Shatah.

The Fractal Nature of the Abelian Sandpile

Series
PDE Seminar
Time
Tuesday, October 25, 2011 - 15:05 for 1 hour (actually 50 minutes)
Location
Skiles 005
Speaker
Charles Smart – MIT
I will discuss a natural elliptic obstacle problem that arises in the study of the Abelian sandpile. The Abelian sandpile is a deterministic growth model from statistical physics which produces beautiful fractal-like images. In recent joint work with Wesley Pegden, we characterize the continuum limit of the sandpile processusing PDE techniques. In follow up work with Lionel Levine and Wesley Pegden, we partially describe the fractal structure of the stable sandpiles via a careful analysis of the limiting obstacle problem.

Ground state for nonlinear Schrodinger equation with sign-changing and vanishing potential.

Series
PDE Seminar
Time
Tuesday, October 4, 2011 - 15:05 for 1 hour (actually 50 minutes)
Location
Skiles 005
Speaker
Zhengping Wang – Wuhan Institute of Physics and Mathematics, Chinese Academy of Sciences, and Georgia Tech
We consider the stationary nonlinear Schrodinger equation when the potential changes sign and may vanish at infinity. We prove that there exists a sign-changing ground state and the so called energy doubling property for sign-changing solutions does not hold. Furthermore, we find that the ground state energy is not equal to the infimum of energy functional over the Nehari manifold. These phenomena are quite different from the case of positive potential.

The ABP maximum principle for fully nonlinear PDE with unbounded coefficients.

Series
PDE Seminar
Time
Tuesday, September 20, 2011 - 15:05 for 1 hour (actually 50 minutes)
Location
Skiles 005
Speaker
Shigeaki Koike – Saitama University, Japan
In this talk, I will show recent results on the Aleksandrov-Bakelman-Pucci (ABP for short) maximum principle for $L^p$-viscosity solutions of fully nonlinear, uniformly elliptic partial differential equations with unbounded inhomogeneous terms and coefficients. I will also discuss some cases when the PDE has superlinear terms in the first derivatives. This is a series of joint works with Andrzej Swiech.

On the pullback equation for differential forms.

Series
PDE Seminar
Time
Tuesday, September 6, 2011 - 15:05 for 1 hour (actually 50 minutes)
Location
Skiles 005
Speaker
Bernard Dacorogna – Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne
An important question in geometry and analysis is to know when two $k$-forms $f$ and $g$ are equivalent. The problem is therefore to find a map $\varphi$ such that $\varphi^*(g) =f$. We will mostly discuss the symplectic case $k=2$ and the case of volume forms$k=n$. We will give some results on the more difficult case where $3\leq k\leq n-2$, the case $k=n-1$ will also be considered.

Global Regularity for Three-dimensional Navier-Stokes Equations and Relevant Geophysical Models

Series
PDE Seminar
Time
Tuesday, April 26, 2011 - 11:00 for 1 hour (actually 50 minutes)
Location
Skiles 005
Speaker
Prof. Edriss Titi – UC Irvine and Wiezmann Institute –
The basic problem faced in geophysical fluid dynamics isthat a mathematical description based only on fundamental physicalprinciples, the so-called the ``Primitive Equations'', is oftenprohibitively expensive computationally, and hard to studyanalytically. In this talk I will survey the main obstacles inproving the global regularity for the three-dimensionalNavier-Stokes equations and their geophysical counterparts. Eventhough the Primitive Equations look as if they are more difficult tostudy analytically than the three-dimensional Navier-Stokesequations I will show in this talk that they have a unique global(in time) regular solution for all initial data.Inspired by this work I will also provide a new globalregularity criterion for the three-dimensional Navier-Stokesequations involving the pressure.This is a joint work with Chongsheng Cao.

Two-dimensional Riemann problems for compressible Euler systems

Series
PDE Seminar
Time
Tuesday, April 19, 2011 - 11:00 for 1 hour (actually 50 minutes)
Location
Skiles 005
Speaker
Prof. Yuxi Zheng – Penn State University and Yeshiva University, –
We consider Riemann problems for the compressible Euler system in aerodynamics in two space dimensions. The solutionsinvolve shock waves, hyperbolic and elliptic regions. There are also regions which we call semi-hyperbolic. We have shownbefore the existence of such solutions, and now we show regularity of the boundaries of such regions.

Pages