Holder estimates for advection fractional-diffusion equations

We analyse conditions for an evolution equation with a drift and fractional diffusion to have a Holder continuous solution. In case the diffusion is of order one or more, we obtain Holder estimates for the solution for any bounded drift. In the case when the diffusion is of order less than one, we require the drift to be a Holder continuous vector field in order to obtain the same type of regularity result.Comment: some typos fixe

On the differentiability of the solution to the Hamilton-Jacobi equation with critical fractional diffusion

We prove that the Hamilton Jacobi equation for an arbitrary Hamiltonian $H$ (locally Lipschitz but not necessarily convex) and fractional diffusion of order one (critical) has classical $C^{1,\alpha}$ solutions. The proof is achieved using a new H\"older estimate for solutions of advection diffusion equations of order one with bounded vector fields that are not necessarily divergence free

Upper bounds for multiphase composites in any dimension

We prove a rigorous upper bound for the effective conductivity of an isotropic composite made of several isotropic components in any dimension. This upper bound coincides with the Hashin Shtrikman bound when the volume ratio of all phases but any two vanish

A Brief Critical Introduction to the Ontological Argument and its Formalization: Anselm, Gaunilo, Descartes, Leibniz and Kant

The purpose of this paper is twofold. First, it aims at introducing the ontological argument through the analysis of five historical developments: Anselm’s argument found in the second chapter of his Proslogion, Gaunilo’s criticism of it, Descartes’ version of the ontological argument found in his Meditations on First Philosophy, Leibniz’s contribution to the debate on the ontological argument and his demonstration of the possibility of God, and Kant’s famous criticisms against the (cartesian) ontological argument. Second, it intends to critically examine the enterprise of formally analyzing philosophical arguments and, as such, contribute in a small degree to the debate on the role of formalization in philosophy. My focus will be mainly on the drawbacks and limitations of such enterprise; as a guideline, I shall refer to a Carnapian, or Carnapian-like theory of argument analysis

Combining spectral sequencing and parallel simulated annealing for the MinLA problem

In this paper we present and analyze new sequential and parallel heuristics to approximate the Minimum Linear Arrangement problem (MinLA). The heuristics consist in obtaining a first global solution using Spectral Sequencing and improving it locally through Simulated Annealing. In order to accelerate the annealing process, we present a special neighborhood distribution that tends to favor moves with high probability to be accepted. We show how to make use of this neighborhood to parallelize the Metropolis stage on distributed memory machines by mapping partitions of the input graph to processors and performing moves concurrently. The paper reports the results obtained with this new heuristic when applied to a set of large graphs, including graphs arising from finite elements methods and graphs arising from VLSI applications. Compared to other heuristics, the measurements obtained show that the new heuristic improves the solution quality, decreases the running time and offers an excellent speedup when ran on a commodity network made of nine personal computers.Postprint (published version