Blow-up in nonlinear heat equations

We study the blow-up of solutions of nonlinear heat equations in dimension 1. We show that for an open set of even initial data which are characterized roughly by having maxima at the origin, the solutions blow up in finite time and at a single point. We find the universal blow-up profile and remainder estimates. Our results extend previous results in several directions and our techniques differ from the techniques previously used for this problem. In particular, they do not rely on maximum principle.