Broomcorn millet and foxtail millet were first cultivated in Neolithic China then the process spread west across Asia during the Bronze Age. But the distinctive ceramic, and later bronze, vessels utilised in East Asian cuisines for boiling and steaming grains did not move west alongside these crops. Here, the authors use measurements of 3876 charred millet grains to evaluate regional variations and implications for food preparation. In contrast to wheat grains, which became smaller as their cultivation moved east, millet grains became larger as they spread from northern China into Inner Asia and Tibet. This indicates the decoupling of millets from associated cooking techniques as they reached geographical and cultural areas.

This paper is devoted to the American option pricing problem governed by the Black-Scholes equation. The existence of an optimal exercise policy makes the problem a free boundary value problem of a parabolic equation on an unbounded domain. The optimal exercise boundary satisfies a nonlinear Volterra integral equation and is solved by a high-order collocation method based on graded meshes. This free boundary is then deformed to a fixed boundary by the front-fixing transformation. The boundary condition at infinity (due to the fact that the underlying asset's price could be arbitrarily large in theory), is treated by the perfectly matched layer technique. Finally, the resulting initial-boundary value problems for the option price and some of the Greeks on a bounded rectangular space-time domain are solved by a finite element method. In particular, for Delta, one of the Greeks, we propose a discontinuous Galerkin method to treat the discontinuity in its initial condition. Convergence results for these two methods are analyzed and several numerical simulations are provided to verify these theoretical results.

The pricing model for American lookback options can be characterised as a two-dimensional free boundary problem. The main challenge in this problem is the free boundary, which is also the main concern for financial investors. We use a standard technique to reduce the pricing model to a one-dimensional linear complementarity problem on a bounded domain and obtain a corresponding variational inequality. The inequality is discretised by finite differences and finite elements in the temporal and spatial directions, respectively. By enforcing inequality constraints related to the options using Lagrange multipliers, the discretised variational inequality is reformulated as a set of semi-smooth equations, which are solved by a primal-dual active set method. One of the major advantages of our algorithm is that we can obtain the option values and the free boundary simultaneously, and numerical simulations show that our approach is as efficient as some other methods.

An efficient numerical method is proposed for the valuation of American options via the Black-Scholes variational inequality. A far field boundary condition is employed to truncate the unbounded domain problem to produce the bounded domain problem with the associated variational inequality, to which our finite element method is applied. We prove that the matrix involved in the finite element method is symmetric and positive definite, and solve the discretized variational inequality by the projection and contraction method. Numerical experiments are conducted that demonstrate the superior performance of our method, in comparison with earlier methods.