Pit your wits against young minds!

This column is a place for those bits of contagious mathematics that travel from person to person in the community, because they are so elegant, suprising, or appealing that one has an urge to pass them on. Contributions are most welcome.     

Optimal control of unsteady compressible viscous flows

The control of complex, unsteady flows is a pacing technology for advances in fluid mechanics. Recently, optimal control theory has become popular as a means of predicting best case controls that can guide the design of practical flow control systems. However, most of the prior work in this area has focused on incompressible flow which precludes many of the important physical flow phenomena that must be controlled in practice including the coupling of fluid dynamics, acoustics, and heat transfer. This paper presents the formulation and numerical solution of a class of optimal boundary control problems governed by the unsteady two‐dimensional compressible Navier–Stokes equations. Fundamental issues including the choice of the control space and the associated regularization term in the objective function, as well as issues in the gradient computation via the adjoint equation method are discussed. Numerical results are presented for a model problem consisting of two counter‐rotating viscous vortices above an infinite wall which, due to the self‐induced velocity field, propagate downward and interact with the wall. The wall boundary control is the temporal and spatial distribution of wall‐normal velocity. Optimal controls for objective functions that target kinetic energy, heat transfer, and wall shear stress are presented along with the influence of control regularization for each case. Copyright © 2002 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Separation in distributive congruence lattices

We define separable sets in algebraic lattices. For a finitely generated congruence distributive variety V \mathcal{V} , we show a close connection between non-separable sets in congruence lattices of algebras in V \mathcal{V} and the structure of subdirectly irreducible algebras in V \mathcal{V} . We apply the general results to some lattice varieties.     

Mother-to-child transmission of HIV: a simulation-based approach for the evaluation of intervention strategies

Mother-to-child transmission (MTCT) of HIV is the most significant source of HIV infection in children below the age of 15 years. In 2000 alone, about 600 000 new infections occurred, the vast majority from mothers living in developing countries who were not aware of their HIV-positive status. To date, at least 4.3 million children have died from AIDS. In this paper, we discuss the development of an operational model that can be used to evaluate intervention options for the prevention of MTCT of HIV. The problem was approached by defining suitable pregnancy risk groups, prevention options and the required model outputs to evaluate different intervention strategies. The method chosen to approach the problem was a discrete-event, three-phase simulation, built in Visual Basic, with a stochastic semi-Markov structure. The developed model takes individual pregnant women through each stage of their pregnancy, labour and birth. Different intervention strategies may be modelled at any time, including short-course antiretroviral drugs and cessation of breastfeeding. The model is demonstrated with data from Botswana, which has one of the highest HIV-infection rates in the world.     

Stability of Markovian structure observed in high frequency foreign exchange data

Contrary to the common sense in economics and financial engineering, price fluctuations at very fine level of motion exhibit various evidences against the efficient market hypothesis. We attempt to investigate this issue by studying extensive amount of foreign currency exchange data for over five years at the finest level of resolution. We specifically focus on the proposed stability in binomial conditional probabilities originally found in much smaller examples of financial time series. In order to handle very large data, we have written an efficient program in C that automatically generates those conditional probabilities. It is found that the stability is maintained for extremely large time duration that covers almost the entire period. Based on the length of conditions for which the conditional probabilities are distinguishable each other, we identify the length of memory being less than 3 movements.     

On the Metrical Theory of Continued Fraction Mixing Fibred Systems and Its Application to Jacobi-Perron Algorithm

 We study the metrical theory of fibred systems, in particular, in the case of continued fraction mixing systems. We get the limit distribution of the largest value of a continued fraction mixing stationary stochastic process with infinite expectation and some related results. These are analogous to J. Galambos, W. Philipp, and H. G. Diamond–J. D. Vaaler theorems for the regular continued fractions. As an application, we see that these theorems hold for Jacobi-Perron algorithm. Received September 30, 2001; in revised form January 8, 2002     

Atomistic phenomena in dense fluid shock waves

The shock structure problem is one of the classical problems of fluid mechanics and at least for non-reacting dilute gases it has been considered essentially solved. Here we present a few recent findings, to show that this is not the case. There are still new physical effects to be discovered provided that the numerical technique is general enough to not rule them out a priori. While the results have been obtained for dense fluids, some of the effects might also be observable for shocks in dilute gases.