We consider a stochastic model for a defined-contribution pension fund in continuous time. In particular, we focus on the portfolio problem of a fund manager who wants to maximize the expected utility of his terminal wealth in a complete financial market with stochastic interest rate. The fund manager must cope with a set of stochastic investment opportunities and two background risks: the sala...

Wilson loops which are small deviations from straight, infinite lines, called wavy lines, are considered in the context of the AdS/CFT correspondence. A single wavy line and the connected correlation function of a straight and wavy line are considered. It is argued that, to leading order in “waviness”, the functional form of the loop is universal and the coefficient, which is a function of the ...

In many situations, the numerical derivative of a function at a point x must be calculated since the function is not defined by a closed-form expression, but rather by values of the function at grid points at and around x. This typically arises when enforcing the boundary conditions while solving a differential equation. Usually, one employs a 2or 3-point formula to approximate the derivative. ...

We describe the development of a scoring function designed to model the hydrophobic effect in protein folding. An optimization technique is used to determine the best functional form of the hydrophobic potential. The scoring function is expanded using the Chebyshev polynomials, for which the coefficients are determined by minimizing the Z-score of native structures in the ensembles of alternate...

This work deals with the use of the conjugate gradient method in conjunction with an adjoint problem formulation for the simultaneous estimation of the spatially varying diffusion coefficient and of the source term distribution in a one-dimensional nonlinear diffusion problem. In the present approach, no a priori assumption is required regarding the functional form of the unknowns. This work ca...