The chemical master equation is a fundamental equation in chemical kinetics. It underlies the classical reaction-rate equations and takes stochastic effects into account. In this paper we give a simple argument showing that the solutions of a large class of chemical master equations are bounded in weighted ℓ1-spaces and possess high-order moments. This class includes all equations in which no reactions between two or more already present molecules and further external reactants occur that add mass to the system. As an illustration for the implications of this kind of regularity, we analyze the effect of truncating the state space. This leads to an error analysis for the finite state projections of the chemical master equation, an approximation that forms the basis of many numerical methods.

The electronic Schrödinger equation describes the motion of N electrons under Coulomb interaction forces in a field of clamped nuclei. The solutions of this equation, the electronic wave functions, depend on 3N variables, three spatial dimensions for each electron. Approximating them is thus inordinately challenging. As is shown in the author's monograph [Yserentant, Lecture Notes in Mathematics2000, Springer (2010)], the regularity of the solutions, which increases with the number of electrons, the decay behavior of their mixed derivatives, and the antisymmetry enforced by the Pauli principle contribute properties that allow these functions to be approximated with an order of complexity which comes arbitrarily close to that for a system of two electrons. The present paper complements this work. It is shown that one can reach almost the same complexity as in the one-electron case adding a simple regularizing factor that depends explicitly on the interelectronic distances.

Multigrid methods are the fastest known methods for the solution of the large systems of equations arising from the discretization of partial differential equations. For self-adjoint and coercive linear elliptic boundary value problems (with Laplace's equation and the equations of linear elasticity as two typical examples), the convergence theory reached a mature, if not its final state. The present article reviews old and new developments for this type of equation and describes the recent advances.