Erdos, Horvath and Joo discovered some years ago that for some real numbers 1 < q < 2 there exists only one sequence c(i) of zeroes and ones such that Sigma c(i) q(-i) = 1. Subsequently, the set U of these numbers was characterized algebraically in [P. Erdos, I. Joo, V. Komornik, Characterization of the unique expansions 1 = Sigma q(-ni) and related problems, Bull. Soc. Math. France 118 (1990) 377-390] and [V. Komornik, P. Loreti, Subexpansions, superexpansions and uniqueness properties in non-integer bases, Period. Math. Hungar. 44 (2) (2002) 195-216]. We establish an analogous characterization of the closure (U) over bar of U. This allows us to clarify the topological structure of these sets: (U) over bar U is a countable dense set of (U) over bar, so the latter set is perfect. Moreover, since U is known to have zero Lebesgue measure, (U) over bar is a Cantor set. (C) 2006 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved

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We consider a geometric motion associated with the minimization of a curvature dependent functional, which is related to the Willmore functional. Such a functional arises in connection with the image segmentation problem in computer vision theory. We show by using formal asymptotics that the geometric motion can be approximated by the evolution of the zero level set of the solution of a nonlinear fourth-order equation related to the Cahn–Hilliard and Allen–Cahn equations.