John Gonzalez is a South Kingstown, Rhode Island resident of Ta'no descent, whose ceremonial name, Kanipawit Maskwa (Standing Bear), was given to him during the final days of the Standing Rock occupation in North Dakota, where over 500 Tribal Nations and their allies prayerfully came together and stood against a militarized corporation. A water protector who spent three months on the front lines, John worked with leadership to help evacuees and those who remained during the worst blizzard in North Dakota history, as well as prayerfully engaging in nonviolent direct action against DAPL.

This collection of 200+ portraits of pierced, tattooed, and heavily body-modified people is a celebration by photographer Efrain John Gonzalez. In this colorful volume Gonzalez, as an artist, captures both the spirit of the many individuals and the rich uniqueness of their fantastic tattoos, piercings, brandings, cuttings, subdermal implants, and radical transformations. Many of the images of this great tattoo art and extreme individuals were photographed during the past decade during the New York City Tattoo Convention at the Roseland Ballroom. Gonzalez has a reputation as one of America's most prolific fetish documentarians, and he has traveled America to make images of people stretching their limits... and their skin. Much of his work was taken live at the moment it happened, and in places that aren't accessible for most people. Gonzalez seeks out truth in people and in this volume he shares it with the reader in a collection quite unlike anything else.

In this dissertation we prove local existence and uniqueness of solutions of the focusing modified Korteweg - de Vries equation u_t + u2u_x + u_{xxx} = 0 in classes of unbounded functions that admit an asymptotic expansion at infinity in decreasing powers of $x$. We show that an asymptotic solution differs from a genuine solution by a smooth function that is of Schwartz class with respect to $x$ and that solves a generalized version of the focusing mKdV equation. The latter equation is solved by discretization methods. The text is written for researchers of partial differential equations but all proofs are given with full details and the text should be accessible to graduate students of mathematics.