Relative-Periodic Elastic Collisions of Water Waves

We compute time-periodic and relative-periodic solutions of the free-surface Euler equations that take the form of overtaking collisions of unidirectional solitary waves of different amplitude on a periodic domain. As a starting guess, we superpose two Stokes waves offset by half the spatial period. Using an overdetermined shooting method, the background radiation generated by collisions of the Stokes waves is tuned to be identical before and after each collision. In some cases, the radiation is effectively eliminated in this procedure, yielding smooth soliton-like solutions that interact elastically forever. We find examples in which the larger wave subsumes the smaller wave each time they collide, and others in which the trailing wave bumps into the leading wave, transferring energy without fully merging. Similarities notwithstanding, these solutions are found quantitatively to lie outside of the Korteweg-de Vries regime. We conclude that quasi-periodic elastic collisions are not unique to integrable model water wave equations when the domain is periodic.Comment: 20 pages, 13 figure

Inf-sup estimates for the Stokes problem in a periodic channel

We derive estimates of the Babu\u{s}ka-Brezzi inf-sup constant $\beta$ for two-dimensional incompressible flow in a periodic channel with one flat boundary and the other given by a periodic, Lipschitz continuous function $h$. If $h$ is a constant function (so the domain is rectangular), we show that periodicity in one direction but not the other leads to an interesting connection between $\beta$ and the unitary operator mapping the Fourier sine coefficients of a function to its Fourier cosine coefficients. We exploit this connection to determine the dependence of $\beta$ on the aspect ratio of the rectangle. We then show how to transfer this result to the case that $h$ is $C^{1,1}$ or even $C^{0,1}$ by a change of variables. We avoid non-constructive theorems of functional analysis in order to explicitly exhibit the dependence of $\beta$ on features of the geometry such as the aspect ratio, the maximum slope, and the minimum gap thickness (if $h$ passes near the substrate). We give an example to show that our estimates are optimal in their dependence on the minimum gap thickness in the $C^{1,1}$ case, and nearly optimal in the Lipschitz case.Comment: 18 pages, 4 figure

An infinite branching hierarchy of time-periodic solutions of the Benjamin-Ono equation

We present a new representation of solutions of the Benjamin-Ono equation that are periodic in space and time. Up to an additive constant and a Galilean transformation, each of these solutions is a previously known, multi-periodic solution; however, the new representation unifies the subset of such solutions with a fixed spatial period and a continuously varying temporal period into a single network of smooth manifolds connected together by an infinite hierarchy of bifurcations. Our representation explicitly describes the evolution of the Fourier modes of the solution as well as the particle trajectories in a meromorphic representation of these solutions; therefore, we have also solved the problem of finding periodic solutions of the ordinary differential equation governing these particles, including a description of a bifurcation mechanism for adding or removing particles without destroying periodicity. We illustrate the types of bifurcation that occur with several examples, including degenerate bifurcations not predicted by linearization about traveling waves.Comment: 27 pages, 6 figure

Program to determine space vehicle response to wind turbulence

Computer program was developed as prelaunch wind monitoring tool for Saturn 5 vehicle. Program accounts for characteristic wind changes including turbulence power spectral density, wind shear, peak wind velocity, altitude, and wind direction using stored variational statistics

A local construction of the Smith normal form of a matrix polynomial

We present an algorithm for computing a Smith form with multipliers of a regular matrix polynomial over a field. This algorithm differs from previous ones in that it computes a local Smith form for each irreducible factor in the determinant separately and then combines them into a global Smith form, whereas other algorithms apply a sequence of unimodular row and column operations to the original matrix. The performance of the algorithm in exact arithmetic is reported for several test cases.Comment: 26 pages, 6 figures; introduction expanded, 10 references added, two additional tests performe

Museums & Society 2034: Trends and Potential Futures

What challenges will society and museums face in the next quarter-century? How will the demographic profile of America change between now and 2034? How will energy and infrastructure costs affect the sustainability of museums? What will Web 3.0 -- or 5.0 or 6.0 -- look like? Will the "real" survive the assault of the "virtual"? Will the number of leisure-time alternatives continue to grow? Will the lines between work and leisure, public and private, continue to blur? Most importantly, how will museums face these challenges and shape the future they will have to inhabit?This report, commissioned by the Center for the Future of Museums at the American Association of Museums, projects current social trends to 2034 and suggests how museums can face future challenges while continuing to meet their mission of public service. The report focuses on four major trends: demographic shifts, globalization, the revolution in information and communication technologies, and new cultural assumptions about the primacy of the individual as creator and curator

Variational Particle Schemes for the Porous Medium Equation and for the System of Isentropic Euler Equations

Both the porous medium equation and the system of isentropic Euler equations can be considered as steepest descents on suitable manifolds of probability measures in the framework of optimal transport theory. By discretizing these variational characterizations instead of the partial differential equations themselves, we obtain new schemes with remarkable stability properties. We show that they capture successfully the nonlinear features of the flows, such as shocks and rarefaction waves for the isentropic Euler equations. We also show how to design higher order methods for these problems in the optimal transport setting using backward differentiation formula (BDF) multi-step methods or diagonally implicit Runge-Kutta methods.Comment: 36 pages, 9 figures; re-wrote introduction, added 6 references, added discussion of diagonally implicit Runge-Kutta schemes, moved some material to appendice

Comparison of five methods of computing the Dirichlet-Neumann operator for the water wave problem

We compare the effectiveness of solving Dirichlet-Neumann problems via the Craig-Sulem (CS) expansion, the Ablowitz-Fokas-Musslimani (AFM) implicit formulation, the dual AFM formulation (AFM*), a boundary integral collocation method (BIM), and the transformed field expansion (TFE) method. The first three methods involve highly ill-conditioned intermediate calculations that we show can be overcome using multiple-precision arithmetic. The latter two methods avoid catastrophic cancellation of digits in intermediate results, and are much better suited to numerical computation. For the Craig-Sulem expansion, we explore the cancellation of terms at each order (up to 150th) for three types of wave profiles, namely band-limited, real-analytic, or smooth. For the AFM and AFM* methods, we present an example in which representing the Dirichlet or Neumann data as a series using the AFM basis functions is impossible, causing the methods to fail. The example involves band-limited wave profiles of arbitrarily small amplitude, with analytic Dirichlet data. We then show how to regularize the AFM and AFM* methods by over-sampling the basis functions and using the singular value decomposition or QR-factorization to orthogonalize them. Two additional examples are used to compare all five methods in the context of water waves, namely a large-amplitude standing wave in deep water, and a pair of interacting traveling waves in finite depth.Comment: 31 pages, 18 figures. (change from version 1: corrected error in table on page 12