We define and study families of conjugate and reflected curve congruences associated to a self-adjoint operator on a smooth and oriented surface M endowed with a Lorentzian metric g. These families trace parts of the pencil joining the equations of the -asymptotic and the -principal curves, and the pencil joining the -characteristic and the -principal curves, respectively. The binary differential equations (BDEs) of these curves can be viewed as points in the projective plane. Using the polar lines of various BDEs with respect to the conic of degenerate quadratic forms, we obtain geometric results on the above pencils and their relation with the metric g, on the type of solutions of a given BDE, of its -conjugate equation and on BDEs with orthogonal roots.

We give an elementary proof of the unique, global-in-time solvability of the coagulation–(multiple) fragmentation equation with polynomially bounded fragmentation and particle production rates and a bounded coagulation rate. The proof relies on a new result concerning domain invariance for the fragmentation semigroup which is based on a simple monotonicity argument.

We continue to study the nonlinear fourth-order problem TΔu – DΔ2u = λ/(L + u)2, –L < u < 0 in Ω, u = 0, Δu = 0 on ∂Ω, where Ω ⊂ ℝN is a bounded smooth domain and λ > 0 is a parameter. When N = 2 and Ω is a convex domain, we know that there is λc > 0 such that for λ ∊ (0, λc) the problem possesses at least two regular solutions. We will see that the convexity assumption on Ω can be removed, i.e. the main results are still true for a general bounded smooth domain Ω. The main technique in the proofs of this paper is the blow-up argument, and the main difficulty is the analysis of touch-down behaviour.

We explain the basic ideas behind the concept of diffusive wavelets on spheres in the language of representation theory of Lie groups and within the framework of the group Fourier transform given by the Peter-Weyl decomposition of L2() for a compact Lie group . After developing a general concept for compact groups and their homogeneous spaces, we give concrete examples for tori, which reflect the situation on ℝn, and for 2 and 3 spheres.

The main results of the paper determine all real meromorphic functions f of finite lower order in the plane such that f has finitely many zeros and non-real poles and such that certain combinations of derivatives of f have few non-real zeros.

We study the question of whether the famous Golod-Shafarevich estimate, which gives a lower bound for the Hilbert series of a (non-commutative) algebra, is attained. This question was considered by Anick in his 1983 paper, ‘Generic algebras and CW-complexes’ (Princeton University Press), where he proved that the estimate is attained for the number of quadratic relations d ≤ ¼n2 and d ≥ ½n2, and conjectured that it is the case for any number of quadratic relations. The particular point where the number of relations is equal to ½n(n – 1) was addressed by Vershik. He conjectured that a generic algebra with this number of relations is finite dimensional.

We prove that over any infinite field, the Anick conjecture holds for d ≥ (n2 + n) and an arbitrary number of generators n, and confirm the Vershik conjecture over any field of characteristic 0. We give also a series of related asymptotic results.

In numerical computations of tsunamis due to submarine earthquakes, it is frequently assumed that the initial displacement of the water surface is equal to the permanent shift of the seabed and that the initial velocity field is equal to zero and the shallow-water equations are often used to simulate the propagation of tsunamis. We give a mathematically rigorous justification of this tsunami model starting from the full water-wave problem by comparing the solution of the full problem with that of the tsunami model. We also show that, in some cases, we have to impose a non-zero initial velocity field, which arises as a nonlinear effect.

We characterize straightness of digital curves in the integer plane by means of difference operators. Earlier definitions of digital rectilinear segments have used, respectively, Rosenfeld’s chord property, word combinatorics, Reveillès’ double Diophantine inequalities, and the author’s refined hyperplanes. We prove that all these definitions are equivalent. We also characterize convexity of integer-valued functions on the integers with the help of difference operators.

Starting with a paper of Jacobson from the 1960s, many authors became interested in characterizing all algebraic number fields in which each integer is the sum of pairwise distinct units. Although there exist many partial results for number fields of low degree, a full characterization of these number fields is still not available. Narkiewicz and Jarden posed an analogous question for sums of units that are not necessarily distinct. In this paper we propose a generalization of these problems. In particular, for a given rational integer n we consider the following problem. Characterize all number fields for which every integer is a linear combination of finitely many units εi in a way that the coefficients ai∈ℕ are bounded by n. The paper gives several partial results on this problem. In our proofs we exploit the fact that these representations are related to symmetric beta expansions with respect to Pisot bases.

We prove that the maximum degree Δn of a random series-parallel graph with n vertices satisfies Δn/logn → c in probability, and Δn ~ c logn for a computable constant c > 0. The same kind of result holds for 2-connected series-parallel graphs, for outerplanar graphs, and for 2-connected outerplanar graphs.

Let G be a graph with m edges, and let k be a positive integer. We show that V(G) admits a k-partition V1, . . . Vk such that for i ∈ {1, 2, . . . k}, and , where e(Vi) denotes the number of edges with both ends in Vi and . This answers a problem of Bollobás and Scott [2] in the affirmative. Moreover, for i ∈ {1, 2, . . ., k}, which is close to being best possible and settles another problem of Bollobás and Scott [2].

We give a moduli interpretation of the outer automorphism group Out of a finite-dimensional algebra similar to that of the Picard group of a scheme. We deduce that the connected component of Out is invariant under derived and stable equivalences. This allows us to transfer gradings between algebras and gives rise to conjectural homological constructions of interesting gradings on blocks of finite groups with abelian defect. We give applications to the lifting of stable equivalences to derived equivalences. We give a counterpart of the invariance result for smooth projective varieties: the product Pic0 × Aut0 is invariant under derived equivalence.

There is an unfortunate error in Theorem 4.1 of our paper. However, the statement of the theorem remains true with a correct construction of adding a tail to enlarge the dynamical system.