Georgia Institute of Technology College of Sciences

We will give an overview of results on the global existence of solutions to the initial value problem for nonlinear elastic and viscoelastic materials in 3d without boundary. Materials will be assumed to be isotropic, but both compressible and incompressible cases will be discussed. In the compressible case, a key null condition must be imposed to control nonlinear interactions of pressure waves. This necessary assumption is consistent with the physical model. Initial conditions are small perturbations of a stress free reference state. Existence is proven using a fixed point argument which combines energy estimates and with some new dispersive estimates.

In this talk we will review results on local entropy theory for the past 15 years, introduce the current development and post some open questions for the further study.

Many results in asymptotic extremal combinatorics are obtained using just a handful of instruments, such as induction and Cauchy-Schwarz inequality. The ingenuity lies in combining these tools in just the right way. Recently, Razborov developed a flag calculus which captures many of the available techniques in pure form, and allows one, in particular, to computerize the search for the right combination. In this talk we outline the general approach and describe its application to the conjecture that a digraph with minimum outdegree n/3 contains a directed triangle. This special case of the Caccetta-Haggkvist conjecture has been extensively investigated in the past. We show that a digraph with minimum outdegree a*n contains a directed triangle for a = 0.3465. The proof builds on arguments used to establish previously known bounds, due to Shen from 1998 (a = 0.3542) and Hamburger, Haxell and Kostochka from 2008 (a = 0.3531). It consists of a combination of ~80 computer generated inequalities. Based on joint work with Jan Hladky and Daniel Kral.

The current theory of global attractors for the Navier-Stokes equations on thin 3D domains is motivated by the desire to better understand the theory of heat transfer in the oceans of the Earth. (In this context, the thinness refers to the aspect ratio - depth divided by expanse - of the oceans.) The issue of heat transfer is, of course, closely connected with many of the major questions concerning the climate. In order to exploit the tools of modern dynamical systems in this study, one needs to know that the global attractors are "good" in the sense that the nonlinearities are Frechet differentiable on these attractors. About 20 years ago, it was discovered that on certain thin 3D domains, the Navier-Stokes equations did possess good global attractors. This discovery, which was itself a major milestone in the study of the 3D Navier-Stokes equations, left open the matter of extending the theory to cover oceanic-like regions with the appropriate physical boundary behavior. In this lecture, we will review this theory, and the connections with climate modeling, while placing special emphasis on the recent developments for fluid flows with the Navier (or slip) boundary conditions