Robin Young
University of Massachussetts at Amherst
We prove global existence of solutions to the equations of isentropic gas dynamics. The pressure p is assumed to be a convex function of the density. This includes the important case of an ideal polytropic gas. We require the initial data to have bounded variation, but this need not be small. There are no restrictions on the supnorm of the data, and in particular, the initial data can include regions of vacuum.