A directed space is a topological space $X$ together with a subspace $\vec {P}(X)\subset X^I$ of directed paths on $X$. A symmetry of a directed space should therefore respect both the topology of the underlying space and the topology of the associated spaces $\vec {P}(X)_-^+$ of directed paths between a source ($-$) and a target ($+$)—up to homotopy. If it is, moreover, homotopic to the identity map—in a directed sense—such a symmetry will be called an inessential d-map, and the paper explores the algebra and topology of inessential d-maps. Comparing two d-spaces $X$ and $Y$ ‘up to symmetry’ yields the notion of a directed homotopy equivalence between them. Under appropriate conditions, all directed homotopy equivalences are shown to satisfy a 2-out-of-3 property. Our notion of directed homotopy equivalence does not agree completely with the one defined in Goubault (2017, arxiv:1709:05702v2) and Goubault, Farber and Sagnier (2020, J. Appl. Comput. Topol. 4, 11–27); the deviation is motivated by examples. Nevertheless, directed topological complexity, introduced in Goubault, Farber and Sagnier (2020) is shown to be invariant under our notion of directed homotopy equivalence. Finally, we show that directed homotopy equivalences result in isomorphisms on the pair component categories of directed spaces introduced in Goubault, Farber and Sagnier (2020).

In this paper, we propose and study an almost periodic reaction–diffusion epidemic model in which disease latency, spatial heterogeneity and general seasonal fluctuations are incorporated. The model is given by a spatially nonlocal reaction–diffusion system with a fixed time delay. We first characterise the upper Lyapunov exponent λ* for a class of almost periodic reaction–diffusion equations with a fixed time delay and provide a numerical method to compute it. On this basis, the global threshold dynamics of this model is established in terms of λ* It is shown that the disease-free almost periodic solution is globally attractive if λ* < 0, while the disease is persistent if λ* > 0. By virtue of numerical simulations, we investigate the effects of diffusion rate, incubation period and spatial heterogeneity on disease transmission.

The paper presents a conceptual mathematical model for Alzheimer’s disease (AD). According to the so-called amyloid cascade hypothesis, we assume that the progression of AD is associated with the presence of soluble toxic oligomers of beta-amyloid. Monomers of this protein are produced normally throughout life, but a change in the metabolism may increase their total production and, through aggregation, ultimately results in a large quantity of highly toxic polymers. The evolution from monomeric amyloid produced by the neurons to senile plaques (long and insoluble polymeric amyloid chains) is modelled by a system of ordinary differential equations (ODEs), in the spirit of the Smoluchowski equation. The basic assumptions of the model are that, at the scale of suitably small representative elementary volumes (REVs) of the brain, the production of monomers depends on the average degradation of the neurons and in turn, at a much slower timescale, the degradation is caused by the number of toxic oligomers. To mimic prion-like diffusion of the disease in the brain, we introduce an interaction among adjacent REVs that can be assumed to be isotropic or to follow given preferential patterns. We display the results of numerical simulations which are obtained under some simplifying assumptions. For instance, the amyloid cascade is modelled by just three ordinary differential equations (ODEs), and the simulations refer to abstract 2D domains, simplifications which can be easily avoided at the price of some additional computational costs. Since the model is suitably flexible to incorporate other mechanisms and geometries, we believe that it can be generalised to describe more realistic situations.

Starting from three-dimensional non-linear elasticity under the restriction of incompressibility, we derive reduced models to capture the behaviour of strings in response to external forces. Our Γ-convergence analysis of the constrained energy functionals in the limit of shrinking cross-sections gives rise to explicit one-dimensional limit energies. The latter depend on the scaling of the applied forces. The effect of local volume preservation is reflected either in their energy densities through a constrained minimization over the cross-section variables or in the class of admissible deformations. Interestingly, all scaling regimes allow for compression and/or stretching of the string. The main difficulty in the proof of the Γ-limit is to establish recovery sequences that accommodate the non-linear differential constraint imposed by the incompressibility. To this end, we modify classical constructions in the unconstrained case with the help of an inner perturbation argument tailored for 3d-1d dimension reduction problems.

We investigate real hypersurfaces in nonflat complex space forms attaining equality in an inequality involving the contact δ-invariant δc(2) introduced by Chen and Mihai in [3].

We develop a deep autoencoder architecture that can be used to find a coordinate transformation which turns a non-linear partial differential equation (PDE) into a linear PDE. Our architecture is motivated by the linearising transformations provided by the Cole–Hopf transform for Burgers’ equation and the inverse scattering transform for completely integrable PDEs. By leveraging a residual network architecture, a near-identity transformation can be exploited to encode intrinsic coordinates in which the dynamics are linear. The resulting dynamics are given by a Koopman operator matrix K. The decoder allows us to transform back to the original coordinates as well. Multiple time step prediction can be performed by repeated multiplication by the matrix K in the intrinsic coordinates. We demonstrate our method on a number of examples, including the heat equation and Burgers’ equation, as well as the substantially more challenging Kuramoto–Sivashinsky equation, showing that our method provides a robust architecture for discovering linearising transforms for non-linear PDEs.

In an r-uniform hypergraph on n vertices, a tight Hamilton cycle consists of n edges such that there exists a cyclic ordering of the vertices where the edges correspond to consecutive segments of r vertices. We provide a first deterministic polynomial-time algorithm, which finds a.a.s. tight Hamilton cycles in random r-uniform hypergraphs with edge probability at least C log3 n/n.

Our result partially answers a question of Dudek and Frieze, who proved that tight Hamilton cycles exist already for p = ω(1/n) for r = 3 and p = (e + o(1))/n for $r \ge 4$ using a second moment argument. Moreover our algorithm is superior to previous results of Allen, Böttcher, Kohayakawa and Person, and Nenadov and Škorić, in various ways: the algorithm of Allen et al. is a randomized polynomial-time algorithm working for edge probabilities $p \ge {n^{ - 1 + \varepsilon}}$, while the algorithm of Nenadov and Škorić is a randomized quasipolynomial-time algorithm working for edge probabilities $p \ge C\mathop {\log }\nolimits^8 n/n$.

In the present paper, we deal with asymptotical stability of Markov operators acting on abstract state spaces (i.e. an ordered Banach space, where the norm has an additivity property on the cone of positive elements). Basically, we are interested in the rate of convergence when a Markov operator T satisfies the uniform P-ergodicity, i.e. $\|T^n-P\|\to 0$, here P is a projection. We have showed that T is uniformly P-ergodic if and only if $\|T^n-P\|\leq C\beta^n$, $0<\beta<1$. In this paper, we prove that such a β is characterized by the spectral radius of T − P. Moreover, we give Deoblin’s kind of conditions for the uniform P-ergodicity of Markov operators.

The study of spherically symmetric motion is important for the theory of explosion waves. In this paper, we consider a ‘spherical piston’ problem for the relativistic Euler equations, which describes the wave motion produced by a sphere expanding into an infinite surrounding medium. We use the reflected characteristics method to construct a global piecewise smooth solution with a single shock of this spherical piston problem, provided that the speed of the sphere is a small perturbation of a constant speed.

The propagation of gradient flow structures from microscopic to macroscopic models is a topic of high current interest. In this paper, we discuss this propagation in a model for the diffusion of particles interacting via hard-core exclusion or short-range repulsive potentials. We formulate the microscopic model as a high-dimensional gradient flow in the Wasserstein metric for an appropriate free-energy functional. Then we use the JKO approach to identify the asymptotics of the metric and the free-energy functional beyond the lowest order for single particle densities in the limit of small particle volumes by matched asymptotic expansions. While we use a propagation of chaos assumption at far distances, we consider correlations at small distance in the expansion. In this way, we obtain a clear picture of the emergence of a macroscopic gradient structure incorporating corrections in the free-energy functional due to the volume exclusion.

In the present paper, we first introduce the concepts of the Lp q-capacity measure and Lp mixed q-capacity and then prove some geometric properties of Lp q-capacity measure and a Lp Minkowski inequality for the q-capacity for any fixed p ⩾ 1 and q > n. As an application of the Lp Minkowski inequality mentioned above, we establish a Hadamard variational formula for the q-capacity under p-sum for any fixed p ⩾ 1 and q > n, which extends results of Akman et al. (Adv. Calc. Var. (in press)). With the Hadamard variational formula, variational method and Lp Minkowski inequality mentioned above, we prove the existence and uniqueness of the solution for the Lp Minkowski problem for the q-capacity which extends some beautiful results of Jerison (1996, Acta Math. 176, 1–47), Colesanti et al. (2015, Adv. Math. 285, 1511–588), Akman et al. (Mem. Amer. Math. Soc. (in press)) and Akman et al. (Adv. Calc. Var. (in press)). It is worth mentioning that our proof of Hadamard variational formula is based on Lp Minkowski inequality rather than the direct argument which was adopted by Akman (Adv. Calc. Var. (in press)). Moreover, as a consequence of Lp Minkowski inequality for q-capacity, we get an interesting isoperimetric inequality for q-capacity.

Whether enjoying the lucid prose of a favourite author or slogging through some other writer’s cumbersome, heavy-set prattle (full of parentheses, em dashes, compound adjectives, and Oxford commas), readers will notice stylistic signatures not only in word choice and grammar but also in punctuation itself. Indeed, visual sequences of punctuation from different authors produce marvellously different (and visually striking) sequences. Punctuation is a largely overlooked stylistic feature in stylometry, the quantitative analysis of written text. In this paper, we examine punctuation sequences in a corpus of literary documents and ask the following questions: Are the properties of such sequences a distinctive feature of different authors? Is it possible to distinguish literary genres based on their punctuation sequences? Do the punctuation styles of authors evolve over time? Are we on to something interesting in trying to do stylometry without words, or are we full of sound and fury (signifying nothing)?

In our investigation, we examine a large corpus of documents from Project Gutenberg (a digital library with many possible editorial influences). We extract punctuation sequences from each document in our corpus and record the number of words that separate punctuation marks. Using such information about punctuation-usage patterns, we attempt both author and genre recognition, and we also examine the evolution of punctuation usage over time. Our efforts at author recognition are particularly successful. Among the features that we consider, the one that seems to carry the most explanatory power is an empirical approximation of the joint probability of the successive occurrence of two punctuation marks. In our conclusions, we suggest several directions for future work, including the application of similar analyses for investigating translations and other types of categorical time series.

We derive and analyse an energy to model lipid raft formation on biological membranes involving a coupling between the local mean curvature and the local composition. We apply a perturbation method recently introduced by Fritz, Hobbs and the first author to describe the geometry of the surface as a graph over an undeformed Helfrich energy minimising surface. The result is a surface Cahn–Hilliard functional coupled with a small deformation energy. We show that suitable minimisers of this energy exist and consider a gradient flow with conserved Allen–Cahn dynamics, for which existence and uniqueness results are proven. Finally, numerical simulations show that for the long-time behaviour raft-like structures can emerge and stabilise, and their parameter dependence is further explored.

This paper is concerned with the resolution of an inverse problem related to the recovery of a function $V$ from the source to solution map of the semi-linear equation $(\Box _{g}+V)u+u^{3}=0$ on a globally hyperbolic Lorentzian manifold $({\mathcal{M}},g)$. We first study the simpler model problem, where $({\mathcal{M}},g)$ is the Minkowski space, and prove the unique recovery of $V$ through the use of geometric optics and a three-fold wave interaction arising from the cubic non-linearity. Subsequently, the result is generalized to globally hyperbolic Lorentzian manifolds by using Gaussian beams.

This paper is mainly concerned with the global asymptotic behaviour of the unique solution to a class of singular Dirichlet problems − Δu = b(x)g(u), u > 0, x ∈ Ω, u|∂Ω = 0, where Ω is a bounded smooth domain in ℝn, g ∈ C1(0, ∞) is positive and decreasing in (0, ∞) with $\lim _{s\rightarrow 0^+}g(s)=\infty$, b ∈ Cα(Ω) for some α ∈ (0, 1), which is positive in Ω, but may vanish or blow up on the boundary properly. Moreover, we reveal the asymptotic behaviour of such a solution when the parameters on b tend to the corresponding critical values.