arXiv subjects
Publications and source records attributed to Willie Wong.
We answer the question: "on which metric spaces $(M,d)$ are all continuous functions uniformly continuous?" Our characterization theorem improves and generalizes a previous result due to Levine and Saunders, and in particular is applicable to metric spaces which are "infinite dimensional."
In an influential 1964 article, P. Lax studied $2 \times 2$ genuinely nonlinear strictly hyperbolic PDE systems (in one spatial dimension). Using the method of Riemann invariants, he showed that a large set of smooth initial data lead to bounded solutions whose first spatial derivatives blow up in finite time, a phenomenon known as wave breaking. In the present article, we study the Cauchy problem for two classes of quasilinear wave equations in two spatial dimensions that are closely related to the systems studied by Lax. When the data have one-dimensional symmetry, Lax's methods can be applied to the wave equations to show that a large set of smooth initial data lead to wave breaking. Here we study solutions with initial data that are close, as measured by an appropriate Sobolev norm, to data belonging to a distinguished subset of Lax's data: the data corresponding to simple plane waves. Our main result is that under suitable relative smallness assumptions, the Lax-type wave breaking for simple plane waves is stable. The key point is that we allow the data perturbations to break the symmetry. Moreover, we give a detailed, constructive description of the asymptotic behavior of the solution all the way up to the first singularity, which is a shock driven by the intersection of null (characteristic) hyperplanes. We also outline how to extend our results to the compressible irrotational Euler equations. To derive our results, we use Christodoulou's framework for studying shock formation to treat a new solution regime in which wave dispersion is not present.
We study time-like hypersurfaces with vanishing mean curvature in the (3+1) dimensional Minkowski space, which are the hyperbolic counterparts to minimal embeddings of Riemannian manifolds. The catenoid is a stationary solution of the associated Cauchy problem. This solution is linearly unstable, and we show that this instability is the only obstruction to the global nonlinear stability of the catenoid. More precisely, we prove in a certain symmetry class the existence, in the neighborhood of the catenoid initial data, of a co-dimension 1 Lipschitz manifold transverse to the unstable mode consisting of initial data whose solutions exist globally in time and converge asymptotically to the catenoid.
In his 2007 monograph, D. Christodoulou proved a remarkable result giving a detailed description of shock formation, for small $H^s$-initial conditions ($s$ sufficiently large), in solutions to the relativistic Euler equations in three space dimensions. His work provided a significant advancement over a large body of prior work concerning the long-time behavior of solutions to higher-dimensional quasilinear wave equations, initiated by F. John in the mid 1970's and continued by S. Klainerman, T. Sideris, L. Hörmander, H. Lindblad, S. Alinhac, and others. Our goal in this paper is to give an overview of his result, outline its main new ideas, and place it in the context of the above mentioned earlier work. We also introduce the recent work of J. Speck, which extends Christodoulou's result to show that for two important classes of quasilinear wave equations in three space dimensions, small-data shock formation occurs precisely when the quadratic nonlinear terms fail the classic null condition.
We introduce a suitable concept of weak evolution in the context of the radial quintic focussing semilinear wave equation on $\mathbb{R}^{3+1}$, that is adapted to continuation past type II singularities. We show that the weak extension leads to type I singularity formation for initial data corresponding to: (i) the Kenig-Merle blow-up solutions with initial energy below the ground state and (ii) the Krieger-Nakanishi-Schlag blow-up solutions sitting initially near and "above" the ground state static solution.