Non-degenerate umbilics, the path formulation and gradient bifurcation problems

Parametrised contact-equivalence is successful for the understanding and classification of the qualitative local behaviour of bifurcation diagrams and their perturbations. Path formulation is an alternative point of view. It makes explicit the singular behaviour due to the core of the bifurcation germ (when the parameters vanish) from the effects of the way parameters enter. Here we show how path formulation can be used to classify and structure efficiently multiparameter bifurcation problems in corank 2 problems. In particular, the non degenerate umbilics singularities are the generic cores in four situations: the general or gradient problems and the Z_2-equivariant (general or gradient) problems where Z_2 acts on the second component of R^2 via the reflection kappa(x,y)=(x,-y). The universal unfolding of the umbilic singularities have an interesting 'Russian doll' type of structure of universal unfoldings in all those categories. In our approach we can handle one, or more, parameter situations using the same framework. We can even consider some special parameter structure (for instance some internal hierarchy). We classify the generic bifurcations with 1, 2 or 3 parameters that occur in those cases. Some results are known with one bifurcation parameter, but the others are new. We discuss some application to the bifurcation of a cylindrical panel under different loads structure. This problem has many natural parameters that provide concrete examples of our generic diagrams around the first interaction of the buckling modes

Many-Body Expanded Full Configuration Interaction. II. Strongly Correlated Regime

In this second part of our series on the recently proposed many-body expanded full configuration interaction (MBE-FCI) method, we introduce the concept of multideterminantal expansion references. Through theoretical arguments and numerical validations, the use of this class of starting points is shown to result in a focussed compression of the MBE decomposition of the FCI energy, thus allowing chemical problems dominated by strong correlation to be addressed by the method. The general applicability and performance enhancements of MBE-FCI are verified for standard stress tests such as the bond dissociations in H$_2$O, N$_2$, C$_2$, and a linear H$_{10}$ chain. Furthermore, the benefits of employing a multideterminantal expansion reference in accelerating calculations of high accuracy are discussed, with an emphasis on calculations in extended basis sets. As an illustration of this latter quality of the MBE-FCI method, results for H$_2$O and C$_2$ in basis sets ranging from double- to pentuple-$\zeta$ quality are presented, demonstrating near-ideal parallel scaling on up to almost $25000$ processing units.Comment: 41 pages, 4 tables, 10 figures, 1 SI attached as an ancillary fil

Social choice theory, game theory, and positive political theory

We consider the relationships between the collective preference and non-cooperative game theory approaches to positive political theory. In particular, we show that an apparently decisive difference between the two approachesthat in sufficiently complex environments (e.g. high-dimensional choice spaces) direct preference aggregation models are incapable of generating any prediction at all, whereas non-cooperative game-theoretic models almost always generate predictionis indeed only an apparent difference. More generally, we argue that when modeling collective decisions there is a fundamental tension between insuring existence of well-defined predictions, a criterion of minimal democracy, and general applicability to complex environments; while any two of the three are compatible under either approach, neither collective preference nor non-cooperative game theory can support models that simultaneously satisfy all three desiderata