We are interested in the possible contributions of mathematical modelling of crime. We refer to numerous and quite recent papers that analyse and discuss empirical data in an attempt to discover stylised trends worthy of being understood through simple models. We summarise part of this literature and try to understand the reasons of important discrepancies in their conclusions. Then we present some recent modelling attempts that may help to understand the large variance in the statistical-based conclusions.

We study blow-up behaviour of solutions of the fourth-order thin film equation which contains a backward (unstable) diffusion term. Our main goal is a detailed study of the case of the first critical exponent where N ≥ 1 is the space dimension. We show that the free-boundary problem with zero contact angle and zero-flux conditions admits continuous sets (branches) of blow-up self-similar solutions. For the Cauchy problem in RN × R+, we detect compactly supported blow-up patterns, which have infinitely many oscillations near interfaces and exhibit a “maximal” regularity there. As a key principle, we use the fact that, for small positive n, such solutions are close to the similarity solutions of the semilinear unstable limit Cahn-Hilliard equation which are better understood and have been studied earlier [19]. We also discuss some general aspects of formation of self-similar blow-up singularities for other values of p.

Small surface tension is known to select a discrete family from the continuum of Saffman–Taylor finger solutions with zero surface tension. Here a method developed recently in Chapman et al. [2] is employed in which a naive perturbation expansion in powers of the surface tension parameter is optimally truncated to show exponentially small terms being switched on across Stokes lines. These terms are responsible for finger selection.

We consider interacting particle systems and their mean-field limits, which are frequently used to model collective aggregation and are known to demonstrate a rich variety of pattern formations. The interaction is based on a pairwise potential combining short-range repulsion and long-range attraction. We study particular solutions, which are referred to as flocks in the second-order models, for the specific choice of the Quasi-Morse interaction potential. Our main result is a rigorous analysis of continuous, compactly supported flock profiles for the biologically relevant parameter regime. Existence and uniqueness are proven for three space dimensions, while existence is shown for the two-dimensional case. Furthermore, we numerically investigate additional Morse-like interactions to complete the understanding of this class of potentials.

Motivated by models from fracture mechanics and from biology, we study the infinite system of differential equations

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where A and F are positive parameters. For fixed A > 0 we show that there are monotone travelling waves for F in an interval Fcrit < F < A, and we are able to give a rigorous upper bound for Fcrit, in contrast to previous work on similar problems. We raise the problem of characterizing those nonlinearities (apparently the more common) for which Fcrit > 0. We show that, for the sine nonlinearity, this is true if A > 2. (Our method yields better estimates than this, but does not include all A > 0.) We also consider the existence and multiplicity of time independent solutions when |F|< Fcrit.

We present a macroscopic model for describing the electrical and thermal behaviour of silicon devices. The model makes use of a set of macroscopic state variables for phonons and electrons that are moments of their respective distribution functions. The evolution equations for these variables are obtained starting from the Bloch–Boltzmann–Peierls kinetic equations for the phonon and the electron distributions, and are closed by means of the maximum entropy principle. All the main interactions between electrons and phonons, the scattering of electrons with impurities, as well as the scattering of phonons among themselves are considered. In particular, we propose a treatment of the optical phonon decay directly based on the expression of its transition rate (Klemens 1966Phys. Rev.148 845; Aksamija & Ravaioli 2010Appl. Phys. Lett.96, 091911). As an application of the model, we evaluate the silicon thermopower.

Capillary waves on fluid sheets are computed in the presence of a uniform electric field acting horizontally with respect to the undisturbed configuration. The fluid is taken to be inviscid, incompressible and nonconducting. In previous work (Papageorgiou & Vanden-Broeck [14]) symmetric travelling waves were investigated. In this paper we show that there are in addition antisymmetric waves. These waves are calculated numerically for arbitrary amplitudes and wavelengths and the effect of the electric field is studied. The numerical procedure is based on a reformulation of the problem as a system of nonlinear integro–differential equations.

In this paper, we study basic properties of the diffusive wave approximation of the shallow water equations (DSW). This equation is a doubly non-linear diffusion equation arising in shallow water flow models. It has been used as a model to simulate water flow driven mainly by gravitational forces and dominated by shear stress, that is, under uniform and fully developed turbulent flow conditions. The aim of this work is to present a survey of relevant results coming from the studies of doubly non-linear diffusion equations that can be applied to the DSW equation when topographic effects are ignored. In fact, we present proofs of the most relevant results existing in the literature using constructive techniques that directly lead to the implementation of numerical algorithms to obtain approximate solutions.

In modelling electrostatically actuated micro- and nano-electromechanical systems, researchers have typically relied on a small-aspect ratio to form a leading-order theory. In doing so, small gradient terms are dropped. Although this approximation has been fruitful, its consequences have not been investigated. Here, this approximation is re-examined, and a new theory which includes often neglected small curvature terms is presented. Furthermore, the solution set of the new theory is explored for the unit disk domain and compared to the standard theory. Also, the analytical results are compared to experimental data.

Recent experiments have shown that patterns can emerge in bacterial colonies genetically modified to have a drop in diffusion when population densities (detected via a quorum sensing mechanism) are sufficiently large. We examine one PDE model of this system, and construct its non-constant stationary solutions in the form of an interface for the bacterial density. We derive the equations for the interface motion and demonstrate analytically that such interface solution is stable when the diffusion rate of bacteria is large and the diffusion rate of signalling molecules, Dh, is small. We further demonstrate that increasing Dh induces a Hopf bifurcation, resulting in a loss of stability, which can lead to either complex spatio-temporal dynamics or extinction of pattern altogether. These results are confirmed by numerical simulations.

We discuss the lithium storage process within a single-particle cathode of a lithium-ion battery. The single storage particle consists of a crystal lattice whose interstitial lattice sites may be empty or reversibly filled with lithium atoms. The resulting evolution equations describe diffusion with mechanical coupling and incorporate volume changes, phase transitions and surface tension. In order to simulate the dynamics, we assume spherical symmetry and fast bulk diffusion of the lithium atoms, which lead to a core shell model. We verify the common assumption of phase nucleation at the external boundary of the particle. This model is capable to predict voltage–capacity behaviour. For slow charging rates, we compare the results with experimental voltage–capacity plots exhibiting hysteretic behaviour. We observe that hysteresis cannot be described within the setting of a single-particle cathode. The origin of this fact is discussed in detail. The result is of enormous importance because single-particle models, in particular core shell models, up to now are very popular in the chemical literature.

The stability theory for rolls in stress-free convection at finite Prandtl number is affected by coupling with low wavenumber two-dimensional mean-flow modes. In this work, a set of modified Ginzburg–Landau equations describing the onset of convection is derived which accounts for these additional modes. These equations can be used to extend the modulation equations of Zippelius & Siggia describing the breakup of rolls, bringing their stability theory into agreement with the results of Busse & Bolton.

In this paper, new non-classical symmetry reductions and exact solutions for the 2+1- dimensional, time-independent and time-dependent, dissipative Zabolotskaya-Khokhlov equations in both cartesian and cylindrical coordinates, are presented. These are obtained using the Direct Method, which was originally developed by Clarkson & Kruskal (1989) to study symmetry reductions of the Boussinesq equation, and which involves no group theoretic techniques. In particular, we derive exact solutions of these Zabolotskaya-Khokhlov equations expressible in terms of elementary functions, Weierstrass elliptic and zeta functions, Weber-Hermite functions and Airy functions. Additionally, it is shown that some previously known solutions of these equations actually arise from non-classical symmetries.

A configuration of near-equilibrium liquid droplets sitting on a precursor film which wets the entire substrate can coarsen in time by two different mechanisms: collapse or collision of droplets. The collapse mechanism, i.e., a larger droplet grows at the expense of a smaller one by mass exchange through the precursor film, is also known as Ostwald ripening. As was shown by K. B. Glasner and T. P. Witelski (‘Collision versus collapse of droplets in coarsening of dewetting thin films’, Phys. D209 (1–4), 2005, 80–104) in case of a one-dimensional substrate, the migration of droplets may interfere with Ostwald ripening: The configuration can coarsen by collision rather than by collapse. We study the role of migration in a two-dimensional substrate for a whole range of mobilities. We characterize the velocity of a single droplet immersed into an environment with constant flux field far away. This allows us to describe the dynamics of a droplet configuration on a two-dimensional substrate by a system of ODEs. In particular, we find by heuristic arguments that collision can be a relevant coarsening mechanism.

We study the blow-up behaviour of solutions of a 2mth order semilinear parabolic equation

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with a superlinear function q(u) for |u| Gt; 1. We prove some estimates on the asymptotic blow-up behaviour. Such estimates apply to general integral evolution equations. We answer the following question: find a continuous function q(u) with a superlinear growth as u → ∞ such that the parabolic equation exhibits regional blow-up in a domain of finite non-zero measure. We show that such a regional blow-up can occur for q(u) = u|ln|u‖2m. We present a formal asymptotic theory explaining that the stable (generic) blow-up behaviour as t → T− is described by the self-similar solution

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of the complex Hamilton–Jacobi equation

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The paper presents a method of computing periodic water waves based on solving an integral equation by means of discretization and automatically finding the mesh on which the functions to be found are approximated by the best way. The power of the method to describe ‘bad functions’ well makes it possible to reproduce all the main results of asymptotic theory for the almost-highest waves (Longuet-Higgins & Fox, 1977, 1978, 1996) by a direct numerical simulation. The method is able to compute two full periods of the oscillations of wave properties for all wave height-to-length ratios. The end of the second period corresponds to the wave steepness that achieves 99.99997% of the limiting value. So, the validity of the asymptotic formulae by Longuet-Higgins & Fox is proved for the steep waves of any finite depth. The refined value of the maximum slope of the free-surfaces is found to be 30.3787°.

We study a generalized class of nonlocal evolution equations which includes those arising in the modelling of electrified film flow down an inclined plane, with applications in enhanced heat or mass transfer through interfacial turbulence. Global existence and uniqueness results are proved and refined estimates of the radius of the absorbing ball in $L^2$ are obtained in terms of the parameters of the equations (the length of the system and the dimensionless electric field-measuring parameter multiplying the nonlocal term). The established estimates are compared with numerical solutions of the equations which in turn suggest an optimal upper bound for the radius of the absorbing ball. A scaling argument is used to explain this and a general conjecture is made based on extensive computations.

Physics-informed neural networks (PINNs) were recently proposed in [18] as an alternative way to solve partial differential equations (PDEs). A neural network (NN) represents the solution, while a PDE-induced NN is coupled to the solution NN, and all differential operators are treated using automatic differentiation. Here, we first employ the standard PINN and a stochastic version, sPINN, to solve forward and inverse problems governed by a non-linear advection–diffusion–reaction (ADR) equation, assuming we have some sparse measurements of the concentration field at random or pre-selected locations. Subsequently, we attempt to optimise the hyper-parameters of sPINN by using the Bayesian optimisation method (meta-learning) and compare the results with the empirically selected hyper-parameters of sPINN. In particular, for the first part in solving the inverse deterministic ADR, we assume that we only have a few high-fidelity measurements, whereas the rest of the data is of lower fidelity. Hence, the PINN is trained using a composite multi-fidelity network, first introduced in [12], that learns the correlations between the multi-fidelity data and predicts the unknown values of diffusivity, transport velocity and two reaction constants as well as the concentration field. For the stochastic ADR, we employ a Karhunen–Loève (KL) expansion to represent the stochastic diffusivity, and arbitrary polynomial chaos (aPC) to represent the stochastic solution. Correspondingly, we design multiple NNs to represent the mean of the solution and learn each aPC mode separately, whereas we employ a separate NN to represent the mean of diffusivity and another NN to learn all modes of the KL expansion. For the inverse problem, in addition to stochastic diffusivity and concentration fields, we also aim to obtain the (unknown) deterministic values of transport velocity and reaction constants. The available data correspond to 7spatial points for the diffusivity and 20 space–time points for the solution, both sampled 2000 times. We obtain good accuracy for the deterministic parameters of the order of 1–2% and excellent accuracy for the mean and variance of the stochastic fields, better than three digits of accuracy. In the second part, we consider the previous stochastic inverse problem, and we use Bayesian optimisation to find five hyper-parameters of sPINN, namely the width, depth and learning rate of two NNs for learning the modes. We obtain much deeper and wider optimal NNs compared to the manual tuning, leading to even better accuracy, i.e., errors less than 1% for the deterministic values, and about an order of magnitude less for the stochastic fields.

The two-dimensional flow of a viscous incompressible fluid in a channel with accelerating walls is analysed by use of Hiemenz's similarity solution. Steady flows and their instabilities are calculated, and unsteady flows are computed by solving the initial-value problem for the governing partial-differential system. Thereby, these exact solutions of the Navier–Stokes equations are found to exhibit turning points, pitchfork bifurcations, Hopf bifurcations and Takens–Bogdanov bifurcations along the route to chaos. The substantial physical result is that the chaos previously found for flows with symmetrically accelerating walls is easily destroyed by a little asymmetry.

The scalar initial value problem \[ u_t = \rho Du + f(u), \] is a model for dispersal. Here $u$ represents the density at point $x$ of a compact spatial region $\Omega \in \mathbb{R}^n$ and time $t$, and $u(\cdot)$ is a function of $t$ with values in some function space $B$. $D$ is a bounded linear operator and $f(u)$ is a bistable nonlinearity for the associated ODE $u_t = f(u)$. Problems of this type arise in mathematical ecology and materials science where the simple diffusion model with $D=\Delta$ is not sufficiently general. The study of the dynamics of the equation presents a difficult problem which crucially differs from the diffusion case in that the semiflow generated is not compactifying. We study the asymptotic behaviour of solutions and ask under what conditions each positive semi-orbit converges to an equilibrium (as in the case $D=\Delta$). We develop a technique for proving that indeed convergence does hold for small $\rho$ and show by constructing a counter-example that this result does not hold in general for all $\rho$.