This paper outlines the manner in which Thom’s theory of catastrophes fits into the Hamilton-Jacobi theory of partial differential equations. The representation of solutions of a first order partial differential equation as lagrangian manifolds allows one to study the local structure of their singularities. The structure of generic singularities is closely related to Thom’s concept of the elementary catastrophe associated to a singularity. Three concepts of the stability of a singularity are discussed....

We give a theorem on error estimates of approximate solutions for explicit and implicit difference functional equations with unknown functions of several variables. We apply this general result to investigate the stability of difference methods for quasilinear functional differential equations with initial boundary condition of Dirichlet type. We consider first order partial functional differential equations and parabolic functional differential problems. We compare the properties of explicit...

We study the growth rate of a cell population that follows an age-structured PDE with time-periodic coefficients. Our motivation comes from the comparison between experimental tumor growth curves in mice endowed with intact or disrupted circadian clocks, known to exert their influence on the cell division cycle. We compare the growth rate of the model controlled by a time-periodic control on its coefficients with the growth rate of stationary models of the same nature, but with averaged coefficients....

In this article, we present a detailed study of the complex calculus of variations introduced in [M. Gondran: Calcul des variations complexe et solutions explicites d’équations d’Hamilton–Jacobi complexes. C.R. Acad. Sci., Paris 2001, t. 332, série I]. This calculus is analogous to the conventional calculus of variations, but is applied here to ${𝐂}^n$ functions in $𝐂$. It is based on new concepts involving the minimum and convexity of a complex function. Such an approach allows us to propose explicit solutions...

We generalize to higher dimension results of Birkhoff and Mather on the existence of orbits wandering in regions of instability of twist maps. This generalization is strongly inspired by the one proposed by Mather. However, its advantage is that it contains most of the results of Birkhoff and Mather on twist maps.

We propose a method of constructing convergent high order schemes for Hamilton-Jacobi equations on triangular meshes, which is based on combining a high order scheme with a first order monotone scheme. According to this methodology, we construct adaptive schemes of weighted essentially non-oscillatory type on triangular meshes for nonconvex Hamilton-Jacobi equations in which the first order monotone approximations are occasionally applied near singular points of the solution (discontinuities of...

We prove the convergence at a large scale of a non-local first order equation to an anisotropic mean curvature motion. The equation is an eikonal-type equation with a velocity depending in a non-local way on the solution itself, which arises in the theory of dislocation dynamics. We show that if an anisotropic mean curvature motion is approximated by equations of this type then it is always of variational type, whereas the converse is true only in dimension two.

We study high-order numerical methods for solving Hamilton-Jacobi equations. Firstly, by introducing new clear concise nonlinear weights and improving their convex combination, we develop WENO schemes of Zhu and Qiu (2017). Secondly, we give an algorithm of constructing a convergent adaptive WENO scheme by applying the simple adaptive step on the proposed WENO scheme, which is based on the introduction of a new singularity indicator. Through detailed numerical experiments on extensive problems including...

We study the convergence or divergence of formal (power series) solutions of first order nonlinear partial differential equations    (SE) f(x,u,Dx u) = 0 with u(0)=0. Here the function f(x,u,ξ) is defined and holomorphic in a neighbourhood of a point $(0,0,{\xi }^0)\in {ℂ}_x^n\times {ℂ}_u\times {ℂ}_{\xi }^n({\xi }^0=D_{x}u\left(0\right))$ and $f(0,0,{\xi }^0)=0$. The equation (SE) is said to be singular if f(0,0,ξ) ≡ 0 $\left(\xi \in {ℂ}^n\right)$. The criterion of convergence of a formal solution $u\left(x\right)={\sum }_{\left|\alpha \right|\ge 1}{u}_{\alpha }{x}^{\alpha }$ of (SE) is given by a generalized form of the Poincaré condition which depends on each formal solution. In the case where the formal...

Let (x,y,z) ∈ ℂ³. In this paper we shall study the solvability of singular first order partial differential equations of nilpotent type by the following typical example: $Pu(x,y,z):=(y{\partial }_x-z{\partial }_y)u(x,y,z)=f(x,y,z){\in }_{x,y,z}$, where $P=y{\partial }_x-z{\partial }_y{:}_{x,y,z}{\to }_{x,y,z}$. For this equation, our aim is to characterize the solvability on ${}_{x,y,z}$ by using the Im P, Coker P and Ker P, and we give the exact forms of these sets.

In this paper we present a few results on convergence for the prime integrals equations connected with the bounce problem. This approach allows both to prove uniqueness for the one-dimensional bounce problem for almost all permissible Cauchy data (see also [6]) and to deepen previous results (see [3], [5], [7]).

We give a new and detailed description of the structure of cut loci, with direct applications to the singular sets of some Hamilton-Jacobi equations. These sets may be non-triangulable, but a local description at all points except for a set of Hausdorff dimension $n-2$ is well known. We go further in this direction by giving a classification of all points up to a set of Hausdorff dimension $n-3$.

We study the Dirichlet boundary value problem for eikonal type equations of ray light propagation in an inhomogeneous medium with discontinuous refraction index. We prove a comparison principle that allows us to obtain existence and uniqueness of a continuous viscosity solution when the Lie algebra generated by the coefficients satisfies a Hörmander type condition. We require the refraction index to be piecewise continuous across Lipschitz hypersurfaces. The results characterize the value...

In the present paper, we consider nonlinear optimal control problems with constraints on the state of the system. We are interested in the characterization of the value function without any controllability assumption. In the unconstrained case, it is possible to derive a characterization of the value function by means of a Hamilton-Jacobi-Bellman (HJB) equation. This equation expresses the behavior of the value function along the trajectories arriving or starting from any position x. In the constrained...