The first boundary value problem for a linear second order parabolic equation is studied under the assumption that the inhomogeneous term is continuous in space and time and Hölder-continuous only with respect to the space variables.

The asymptotic behaviour of solutions to the Becker-Doring cluster equations is determined without the decay assumptions on the initial data made in [3].

Let J(FG) be the Jacobson radical of the group algebra FG of a finite groupG with a Sylow 3-subgroup which is extra-special of order 27 of exponent 3 over a field F of characteristic 3, and let t(G) be the least positive integer t with J(FG)t = 0. In this paper, we prove that t(G) = 9 if G has a normal subgroup H such that (|G:H|, 3) = 1 and if H is either 3-solvable, SL(3,3) or the Tits simple group 2F4(2)'.

In this paper we study some properties of a semilinear elliptic eigenvalue problem with nondefinite right-hand side. In the first part we show that every solution will have its maximum in some specified interval J. If the domain is inside a cone in ℝN with N > 1, then J is strictly smaller than in the one-dimensional case. In the second part we show, for bounded domains, that if the maximum is inside some subinterval of J, then for any eigenvalue there will be at most one solution.

A fractionalisation of the Fourier transform was developed formally by Namias. By workingin ℐ, we found that this theory could be made mathematically rigorous. Here we extend our previous results to the space ℐ′ to consider fractional powers of the distributional Fourier transform. The paper concludes with an application to an ordinary differential equation which shows how a distributional approach can sometimes be more useful than a classical approach.

In the Banach space of real sequences which converge to zero with the supremum norm, we construct a parallelisable dynamical system with uniformly-bounded trajectories.

Methods are developed for determining the decomposition matrices for the spin characters of the symmetric groups Sn for an odd prime p. Some general results are obtained which are non-trivial modifications of the corresponding results for ordinary characters. The methods are used to determine the decomposition matrices for 3 ≦ n ≦ ll, and p = 3 but with an interesting ambiguity in the case n = 9. The second author will deal separately with the cases p = 5, 7, 11.

A new method is developed for finding radially symmetric solutions of semilinear elliptic problems by phase space methods. The basic idea is to formulate a shooting argument from initial conditions at r = 0 which involves encoding the oscillation information about the trajectories under consideration. The main theorem is applied to a particular nonlinearity and produces a cascade of solutions wherein the multiplicity increases with the number of zeros.

Let X be a set with infinite regular cardinality m and let ℱ(X) be the semigroup of all self-maps of X. The semigroup Qm of ‘balanced’ elements of ℱ(X) plays an important role in the study by Howie [3,5,6] of idempotent-generated subsemigroups of ℱ(X), as does the subset Sm of ‘stable’ elements, which is a subsemigroup of Qm if and only if m is a regular cardinal. The principal factor Pm of Qm, corresponding to the maximum ℱ-class Jm, contains Sm and has been shown in [7] to have a number of interesting properties.

Let N2 be the set of all nilpotent elements of index 2 in Pm. Then the subsemigroup (N2) of Pm generated by N2 consists exactly of the elements in Pm/Sm. Moreover Pm/Sm has 2-nilpotent-depth 3, in the sense that