A mathematical theory is introduced in this book to unify a large class of nonlinear partial differential equation (PDE) models for better understanding and analysis of the physical and biological phenomena they represent. The so-called mean field approximation approach is adopted to describe the macroscopic phenomena from certain microscopic principles for this unified mathematical formulation. Two key ingredients for this approach are the notions of duality according to the PDE weak solutions and hierarchy for revealing the details of the otherwise hidden secrets, such as physical mystery hidden between particle density and field concentration, quantized blow up biological mechanism sealed in chemotaxis systems, as well as multi-scale mathematical explanations of the SmoluchowskiPoisson model in non-equilibrium thermodynamics, two-dimensional turbulence theory, self-dual gauge theory, and so forth. This book shows how and why many different nonlinear problems are inter-connected in terms of the properties of duality and scaling, and the way to analyze them mathematically.
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Review:
Overall, this book may serve as a general guide to the duality method for variational models (both convex and non-convex).
--Mathematical Reviews
From the Back Cover:
Mean field approximation has been adopted to describe macroscopic phenomena from microscopic overviews. It is still in progress; fluid mechanics, gauge theory, plasma physics, quantum chemistry, mathematical oncology, non-equilibirum thermodynamics. spite of such a wide range of scientific areas that are concerned with the mean field theory, a unified study of its mathematical structure has not been discussed explicitly in the open literature. The benefit of this point of view on nonlinear problems should have significant impact on future research, as will be seen from the underlying features of self-assembly or bottom-up self-organization which is to be illustrated in a unified way. The aim of this book is to formulate the variational and hierarchical aspects of the equations that arise in the mean field theory from macroscopic profiles to microscopic principles, from dynamics to equilibrium, and from biological models to models that arise from chemistry and physics."
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