In this dissertation several results in Steinhaus graphs are investigated. First under some further conditions imposed on the induced cycles in steinhaus graphs, the order of induced cycles in Steinhaus graphs is at most [(n+3)/2]. Next the results of maximum clique size in Steinhaus graphs are used to enumerate the Steinhaus graphs having maximal cliques. Finally the concept of jumbled graphs and Posa's Lemma are used to show that almost all Steinhaus graphs are Hamiltonian.

In this dissertation, we study fractal sets and their properties, especially the open set condition, Hausdorff dimensions and Hausdorff measures for certain fractal constructions.

The method of steepest descent is applied to a nonlinearly constrained optimization problem which arises in the study of liquid crystals. Let Ω denote the region bounded by two coaxial cylinders of height 1 with the outer cylinder having radius 1 and the inner having radius ρ. The problem is to find a mapping, u, from Ω into R^3 which agrees with a given function v on the surfaces of the cylinders and minimizes the energy function over the set of functions in the Sobolev space H^(1,2)(Ω; R^3) having norm 1 almost everywhere. In the variational formulation, the norm 1 condition is emulated by a constraint function B. The direction of descent studied here is given by a projected gradient, called a B-gradient, which involves the projection of a Sobolev gradient onto the tangent space for B. A numerical implementation of the algorithm, the results of which agree with the theoretical results and which is independent of any strong properties of the domain, is described. In chapter 2, the Sobolev space setting and a significant projection in the theory of Sobolev gradients are discussed. The variational formulation is introduced in Chapter 3, where the issues of differentiability and existence of …

The purpose of this dissertation is to introduce a natural and unifying multifractal formalism which contains the above mentioned multifractal parameters, and gives interesting results for a large class of natural measures. In Part 2 we introduce the proposed multifractal formalism and study it properties. We also show that this multifractal formalism gives natural and interesting results when applied to (nonrandom) graph directed self-similar measures in Rd and "cookie-cutter" measures in R. In Part 3 we use the multifractal formalism introduced in Part 2 to give a detailed discussion of the multifractal structure of random (and hence, as a special case, non-random) graph directed self-similar measures in R^d.