Taming of Complex Dynamical Systems

Abstract

The problem of establishing local existence and uniqueness of solutions to systems of differential equations is well understood and has a long history. However, the problem of proving global existence and uniqueness is more difficult and fails even for some very simple ordinary differential equations. It is still not known if the 3D Navier-Stokes equation have global unique solutions and this open problem is one of the Millennium Prize Problems. However, many of these mathematical models are extremely useful in the understanding of complex physical systems. For years people have considered methods for modifying these equations in order to obtain models that still capture the observed fundamental physics, but for which one can rigorously establish global results. In this thesis we focus on a taming method to achieve this goal and apply taming to modeling and numerical problems. The method is also applied to a class of nonlinear differential equations with conservative nonlinearities and to Burgers’ Equation with Neumann boundary conditions. Numerical results are presented to illustrate the ideas.