Physical Sciences and Mathematics Commons^™

Modeling Feral Hogs In Great Smoky Mountains National Park, Benjamin Anthony Levy

Doctoral Dissertations

Feral Hogs (Sus scrofa) are an invasive species that have occupied the Great Smoky Mountains National Park since the early 1900s. Recent studies have revitalized interest in the pest and have produced useful data. The Park has kept detailed records on mast abundance as well as every removal since 1980 including geographic location and disease sampling. Data obtained via Lidar includes both overstory as well as understory vegetation information. In this dissertation, three models were created and analyzed using the detailed data on vegetation, mast, and harvest history. The first model is discrete in time and space and …

Non-Compact Solutions To Inverse Mean Curvature Flow In Hyperbolic Space, Brian Daniel Allen

Doctoral Dissertations

We investigate Inverse Mean Curvature Flow (IMCF) of non-compact hypersurfaces in hyperbolic space. Specifically, we look at bounded graphs over horospheres in Hyperbolic space and show long time existence of the flow as well as asymptotic convergence to horospheres. Along the way many important local estimates as well as global estimates are obtained. In addition, we develop a useful family of cutoff functions for IMCF as well as a non-compact ODE maximum principle at infinity which are integral tools used throughout the document.

Hankel Operators On The Drury-Arveson Space, James Allen Sunkes Iii

Doctoral Dissertations

The Drury-Arveson space, initially introduced in the proof of a generalization of von Neumann's inequality, has seen a lot of research due to its intrigue as a Hilbert space of analytic functions. This space has been studied in the context of Besov-Sobolev spaces, Hilbert spaces with complete Nevanlinna Pick kernels, and Hilbert modules. More recently, McCarthy and Shalit have studied the connections between the Drury-Arveson space and Hilbert spaces of Dirichlet series, and Davidson and Cloutare have established analogues of classic results of the ball algebra to the multiplier algebra for the Drury-Arveson Space.

The goal of this dissertation is …

Duality Of Scales, Michael Christopher Holloway

Doctoral Dissertations

We establish an interaction between the large scale and small scale using two types of maps from large scale spaces to small scale spaces. First we use slowly oscillating maps, which can be described as those having arbitrarily small variation at infinity. These lead to a Galois connection between certain collections of large scale structures and small scale structures on a given set. Slowly oscillating functions can also be used to define to the notion of a dual pair of scale structures on a space. A dual pair consists of a large and a small scale structure on a space …

Kinetic Monte Carlo Models For Crystal Defects, Kyle Louis Golenbiewski

Doctoral Dissertations

Kinetic Monte Carlo algorithms have become an increasingly popular means to simulate stochastic processes since their inception in the 1960's. One area of particular interest is their use in simulations of crystal growth and evolution in which atoms are deposited on, or hop between, predefined lattice locations with rates depending on a crystal's configuration. Two such applications are heteroepitaxial thin films and grain boundary migration. Heteroepitaxial growth involves depositing one material onto another with a different lattice spacing. This misfit leads to long-range elastic stresses that affect the behavior of the film. Grain boundary migration, on the other hand, describes …

The Conway Polynomial And Amphicheiral Knots, Vajira Asanka Manathunga

Doctoral Dissertations

The Conant's conjecture [7] which has foundation on the Conway polynomial and Vassiliev invariants is the main theme of this research. The Conant's conjecture claim that the Conway polynomial of amphicheiral knots split over integer modulo 4 space. We prove Conant's conjecture for amphicheiral knots coming from braid closure in certain way. We give several counter examples to a conjecture of A. Stoimenow [32] regarding the leading coefficient of the Conway polynomial. We also construct integer bases for chord diagrams up to order 7 and up to order 6 for Vassiliev invariants. Finally we develop a method to extract integer …