Georgia Institute of Technology College of Sciences

In this talk, I will first discuss several chemotaxis models includingthe classical Keller-Segel model.Chemotaxis is the phenomenon in which cells, bacteria, and other single-cell or multicellular organisms direct their movements according to certain chemicals (chemoattractants) in their environment. The mathematical models of chemotaxis are usually described by highly nonlinear time dependent systems of PDEs. Therefore, accurate and efficient numerical methods are very important for the validation and analysis of these systems. Furthermore, a common property of all existing chemotaxis systems is their ability to model a concentration phenomenon that mathematically results in solutions rapidly growing in small neighborhoods of concentration points/curves. The solutions may blow up or may exhibit a very singular, spiky behavior. In either case, capturing such solutions numerically is a challenging problem. In our work we propose a family of stable (even at times near blow up) and highly accurate numerical methods, based on interior penalty discontinuous Galerkin schemes (IPDG) for the Keller-Segel chemotaxis model with parabolic-parabolic coupling. This model is the basic step in the modeling of many real biological processes and it is described by a system of a convection-diffusion equation for the cell density, coupled with a reaction-diffusion equation for the chemoattractant concentration.We prove theoretical hp error estimates for the proposed discontinuous Galerkin schemes. Our proof is valid for pre-blow-up times since we assume boundedness of the exact solution.Numerical experiments to demonstrate the stability and accuracy of the proposed methods for chemotaxis models and comparison with other methods will be presented. Ongoing research projects will be discussed as well.

Müntz polynomials arise from consideration of Müntz's Theorem, which is a beautiful generalization of Weierstrass's Theorem. We prove a new surprisingly simple representation for the Müntz orthogonal polynomials on the interval of orthogonality, and in particular obtain new formulas for some of the classical orthogonal polynomials (e.g. Legendre, Jacobi, Laguerre). This allows us to determine the strong asymptotics on the interval, and the zero spacing behavior follows. This is the first time that such asymptotics have been obtained for general Müntz exponents. We also look at the asymptotic behavior outside the interval, and the asymptotic properties of the associated Christoffel functions.

Weyl proved that if an N-dimensional real vector v has linearly independent coordinates over Q, then its integer multiples v, 2v, 3v, .... are uniformly distributed modulo 1.  Stated multiplicatively (via the exponential map), this can be viewed as a Haar-equidistribution result for the cyclic group generated by a point on the N-dimensional complex unit torus.  I will discuss an analogue of this result over a non-Archimedean field K, in which the equidistribution takes place on the N-dimensional Berkovich projective space over K.  The proof uses a general criterion for non-Archimedean equidistribution, along with a theorem of Mordell-Lang type for the group variety G_m^N over the residue field of K, which is due to Laurent.

The Edrei-Thoma theorem characterizes totally positive functions, and plays an important role in character theory of the infinite symmetric group. The Loewner-Whitney theorem characterizes totally positive elements of the general linear group, and is fundamental for Lusztig's theory of total positivity in reductive groups. In this work we derive a common generalization of the two theorems. The talk is based on joint work with Thomas Lam.