Prime divisors of sparse integers

We obtain a lower bound on the number of prime divisors of integers whose g-ary expansion contains a fixed number of nonzero digits. This revised version was published online in August 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

A vector percolation modeling of oil–gas relative permeabilities

We presented exact analytical formulae and numerical calculation of diffusitivity curves with different law for a local pore behavior and have obtained critical exponent, different from conductivity. The connectivity percolation theory was built only on the conductivity, (the diffusion critical exponent was supposed to be equal to the conductivity exponent) and therefore sees only one side of problem-the scalar side. In many topological problems involving mechanical properties and fluid flow the connectivity scalar percolation geometry does not enough to apply.

One of the most useful aspects of percolation is that many very complicated systems have the same behavior with the same critical exponents. Universality of vector percolation is shown in the coincidence between the experimental measured relative hydraulic permeability of fluid and gas flow through unconsolidated sand and effective conductivity and diffusitivity curves of the bond–site percolation models. Comparisons of our calculation results to natural matches are quite good. We have argued that experimental data may be interpreted as a variant of pure vector percolation and to belong to the same universality class.     

Long-time dynamics of von Karman semi-flows with non-linear boundary/interior damping

We study von Karman evolution equations with non-linear dissipation and with partially clamped and partially free boundary conditions. Two distinctive mechanisms of dissipation are considered: (i) internal dissipation generated by non-linear operator, and (ii) boundary dissipation generated by shear forces friction acting on a free part of the boundary. The main emphasis is given to the effects of boundary dissipation. Under suitable hypotheses we prove existence of a compact global attractor and finiteness of its fractal dimension. We also show that any solution is stabilized to an equilibrium and estimate the rate of the convergence which, in turn, depends on the behaviour at the origin of the functions describing the dissipation.     

On the multidimensional distribution of the subset sum generator of pseudorandom numbers

We show that for a random choice of the parameters, the subset sum pseudorandom number generator produces a sequence of uniformly and independently distributed pseudorandom numbers. The result can be useful for both cryptographic and quasi-Monte Carlo applications and relies on bounds of exponential sums.

     

Identifying several biased coins encountered by a hidden random walk

Suppose that attached to each site z ∈ ? is a coin with bias θ(z), and only finitely many of these coins have nonzero bias. Allow a simple random walker to generate observations by tossing, at each move, the coin attached to its current position. Then we can determine the biases {θ(z)}_z∈?, using only the outcomes of these coin tosses and no information about the path of the random walker, up to a shift and reflection of ?. This generalizes a result of Harris and Keane. © 2004 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Random Struct. Alg., 2004     

Arithmetic functions with linear recurrence sequences

We obtain asymptotic formulas for all the moments of certain arithmetic functions with linear recurrence sequences. We also apply our results to obtain asymptotic formulas for some mean values related to average orders of elements in finite fields.     

Computing Aviation Sparing Policies: Solving a Large Nonlinear Integer Program

Deployed US Navy aircraft carriers must stock a large number of spare parts to support the various types of aircraft embarked on the ship. The sparing policy determines the spares that will be stocked on the ship to keep the embarked aircraft ready to fly. Given a fleet of ten or more aircraft carriers and a cost of approximately 50 million dollars per carrier plus the cost of spares maintained in warehouses in the United States, the sparing problem constitutes a significant portion of the Navy’s resources. The objective of this work is to find a minimum-cost sparing policy that meets the readiness requirements of the embarked aircraft. This is a very large, nonlinear, integer optimization problem. The cost function is piecewise linear and convex while the constraint mapping is highly nonlinear. The distinguishing characteristics of this problem from an optimization viewpoint are that a large number of decision variables are required to be integer and that the nonlinear constraint functions are essentially “black box” functions; that is, they are very difficult (and expensive) to evaluate and their derivatives are not available. Moreover, they are not convex. Integer programming problems with a large number of variables are difficult to solve in general and most successful approaches to solving nonlinear integer problems have involved linear approximation and relaxation techniques that, because of the complexity of the constraint functions, are inappropriate for attacking this problem. We instead employ a pattern search method to each iteration of an interior point-type algorithm to solve the relaxed version of the problem. From the solution found by the pattern search on each interior point iteration, we begin another pattern search on the integer lattice to find a good integer solution. The best integer solution found across all interations is returned as the optimal solution. The pattern searches are distributed across a local area network of non-dedicated, heterogeneous computers in an office environment, thus, drastically reducing the time required to find the solution.