Propagation of chaos and the Hopf-Cole transformation (Q1084578)

In a previous paper it has been shown that Burgers' equation constitutes a limit of a contracted N-body problem when N tends to infinity. By proving that the L-operator may be transformed into a Laplacian \(\Delta\), by using an intertwining operator Q, an unsuccesful attempt was made to obtain a linearizing transformation for the Burgers equation in order to achieve a Hopf-Cole transformation. In this paper the difficulties encountered previously were by-passed and a transformation closely related to the Hopf-Cole transformation was established. The transformation may be used to define the nonlinear evolution equations, which can be obtained by contraction from N-body linear problems, and distinguish the nonlinear equations which can be linearized by using the approximate approach established in this paper.