Energy density and flux of a plane electromagnetic wave Created 2026-09-24 Updated 2026-10-14
For a single traveling vacuum plane electromagnetic wave, gives equal electric and magnetic contributions to electromagnetic energy:
For the fields with linear polarization along and magnetic orientation along specified above,
Angle brackets mean an average over one period at fixed position. The factor comes from averaging squared cosine; is the peak amplitude, whereas the root mean square field is . The equal energy contributions oscillate together, rather than trading energy as in an RLC circuit. [ref].
For , using and ,
A surface normal to therefore has average crossing power . This is incident power; the amount absorbed depends on the surface. Doubling the field amplitude quadruples the average flux.
Leading Taylor term Created 2026-09-24 Updated 2026-10-14
Suppose an analytic function near is not identically zero there. Its Taylor series has a first nonzero coefficient , and
The term is its leading Taylor term. Dividing by gives a limit of as , so this term determines the leading local magnitude and angular behaviour. The remainder uses big O notation; it is smaller by one power near the centre.
For a real-valued analytic function of a real variable, an even integer gives the same nearby sign on both sides of , while an odd integer gives opposite signs. For example, has leading Taylor term and is positive on both sides of zero sufficiently nearby; has leading Taylor term and changes sign there. The finite factor stays positive for . The ordinary constant term is the leading one when .
Termwise differentiation of a power series Created 2026-09-24 Updated 2026-10-14
Inside its radius of convergence, a power series can be differentiated term by term:
The differentiated series has the same radius of convergence. The conclusion concerns the interior, including uniform convergence on smaller closed disks; it does not assert that differentiated boundary series converge wherever the original did. For example, converges conditionally at , but its differentiated series does not.
Applied to the geometric series, it gives the useful identity
Differentiation turns the plain coefficients into integer weights. This is one way generating functions translate a weighted counting question into an operation on a known series. A proof controls the original and differentiated tails on smaller disks; the Weierstrass M-test provides the needed uniform bounds. See Lebl, Basic Analysis, §11.3: power-series differentiation and analyticity.
Cauchy product Created 2026-09-24 Updated 2026-09-24
The Cauchy product has coefficients . Absolute convergence permits regrouping and makes its sum the product of the two sums.
Radius of convergence Created 2026-09-24 Updated 2026-10-14
The radius of convergence of is the unique separating interior absolute convergence from exterior divergence. It converges absolutely when and diverges when . At the centre it always has the finite value , since all positive powers vanish. The boundary convergence of a power series is a separate question.
For , the interior is a disk in the complex plane and an open interval on the real line. A power series converges uniformly on every smaller closed disk . This gives stable polynomial approximation over a whole compact region, rather than a separate limiting calculation at each point. See Jiří Lebl, Basic Analysis, §11.3.2: convergence of power series.
Four examples reveal what measures:
  • has , since its coefficients have constant magnitude one.
  • also has : a factor changes boundary behaviour without changing the limiting coefficient-root growth.
  • has . The ratio test gives successive term ratio for every fixed , producing the exponential function.
  • has . For any , successive term magnitudes have ratio , so the terms do not tend to zero.
The Cauchy-Hadamard theorem computes directly from the coefficients. The attractive feature is that one growth statistic decides convergence throughout the interior and exterior, including sparse series with many zero coefficients. Finite changes to the coefficients do not alter the radius, though they can change the sum.
Subspace iteration Created 2026-09-24 Updated 2026-09-24
Subspace iteration repeatedly applies a matrix to several independent vectors and orthonormalizes them, converging to a dominant invariant subspace when a spectral gap separates the selected eigenvalue cluster.
Inverse iteration Created 2026-09-24 Updated 2026-10-14
Inverse iteration repeatedly solves and normalizes. It is the power method for and converges toward an eigenvector whose eigenvalue is closest to the shift .
Active spectrum of the power method Created 2026-09-24 Updated 2026-10-14
For a diagonalizable matrix, the active spectrum consists of eigenvalues whose eigenspaces have nonzero components of the starting vector in its spectral decomposition. These components are orthogonal projections for a self-adjoint operator, but need not be orthogonal projections for a general diagonalizable matrix. With a unique largest modulus in this active spectrum, the power method selects its eigendirection; an exactly absent dominant component is never created in exact arithmetic.
Quadratic Rayleigh-quotient improvement for the power method Created 2026-09-24 Updated 2026-10-14
For a real symmetric matrix with and a starting vector having nonzero component in the leading eigendirection, power-method direction errors are
whereas the Rayleigh quotient error is
The improvement occurs because orthogonality cancels terms linear in the direction error.
Shallow-water potential vorticity Created 2026-09-24 Updated 2026-09-29
Shallow-water potential vorticity is materially conserved by inviscid, unforced shallow water equations. Linearizing about rest with depth gives an anomaly proportional to
Second potential slow-roll parameter Created 2026-09-24 Updated 2026-10-14
The second potential slow-roll parameter is
Slow roll usually requires both and .
Principal square root of a positive semidefinite matrix Created 2026-09-24 Updated 2026-10-03
If is real symmetric and positive semidefinite, its principal square root is
It is symmetric and positive semidefinite, and is positive definite exactly when is.
Convergence of a positive simple continued fraction Created 2026-09-24 Updated 2026-09-24
When and are positive integers, adjacent convergents satisfy
Even and odd convergents are monotone from opposite sides, their separation is , and . They therefore have a common limit , with
Hermitian positive-definite matrix Created 2026-09-24 Updated 2026-10-03
A complex matrix is Hermitian positive definite when and for every nonzero complex vector .
Spectral condition number of a positive-definite matrix Created 2026-09-24 Updated 2026-10-03
For a real symmetric positive-definite matrix,
It measures the sensitivity of the linear system and controls convergence bounds for iterative solvers.
Sylvester's criterion Created 2026-09-24 Updated 2026-10-18
A Hermitian matrix is a positive-definite matrix exactly when its leading principal minors
are all positive. The leading principal minor uses the first rows and the first columns in the same ordering. For the two-by-two Cholesky decomposition example, and , so the criterion proves positive definiteness without calculating eigenvalues.
The successive pivot elements before taking square roots are , with . Here they are and . In general, a leading triangular matrix factor has determinant equal to the product of its diagonal entries, so
Conversely, positive leading principal minors make each successive Schur complement pivot element positive, allowing the Cholesky decomposition to be constructed. The identity then proves positive definiteness; for complex matrices, replace the transposes by conjugate transposes. This gives a short inductive proof of the criterion.
For , the first minor is positive but . The second Cholesky radicand would be , and directly gives . Thus positive diagonal entries are insufficient. Replacing “positive” by “nonnegative” in just the leading-minor test is also insufficient for positive semidefiniteness: has leading minors , but its quadratic form is negative on .
Rotating-frame solution for a harmonically driven two-level system Created 2026-09-24 Updated 2026-09-24
For
set with
Then evolves under the constant Hamiltonian
Barenblatt solution Created 2026-09-24 Updated 2026-10-05
The Barenblatt solution is a mass-preserving similarity solution of the porous medium equation. For in one dimension it has the form
Pointwise approximation by a Runge exhaustion Created 2026-09-24 Updated 2026-09-29
To approximate a piecewise constant function pointwise, exhaust each of its separated regions by compact subsets whose finite union has connected complement. Apply polynomial Runge approximation to the locally constant holomorphic function on each stage, with errors tending to zero. Every fixed point eventually lies in all later stages, so the uniform stagewise estimates imply pointwise convergence.
A proper closed arc of a circle centered at zero has connected complement and stays away from zero. The polynomial Runge theorem therefore gives polynomials converging uniformly to on .

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