Technique to solve partial differential equations
Naturally leads to the Fourier series, see: solving partial differential equations with the Fourier series, and to other analogous expansions:
One notable application is the solution of the Schrödinger equation via the time-independent Schrödinger equation.
Generalization of Laplace's equation where the value is not necessarily 0.
As mentioned at: math.stackexchange.com/questions/579453/real-world-application-of-fourier-series/3729366#3729366 from solving partial differential equations with the Fourier series citing courses.maths.ox.ac.uk/node/view_material/1720, analogously to the heat equation, the wave linear equation can be be solved nicely with separation of variables.
Far field approximation to Kirchhoff's diffraction formula, i.e. when the plane of observation is far from the object diffracting.
Near field approximation to Kirchhoff's diffraction formula, i.e. when the plane of observation is near the object diffracting.
Examples:
- mechanical resonance, notably:
- pipe instruments
- electronic oscillators, notably:
- LC oscillator, and notably the lossy version RLC circuit
Perhaps a key insight of resonance is that the reonant any lossy system tends to look like the resonance frequency quite quickly even if the initial condition is not the resonant condition itself, because everything that is not the resonant frequency interferes destructively and becomes noise. Some examples of that:
- striking a bell or drum can be modelled by applying an impuse to the system
- playing a pipe instrument comes down to blowing a piece that vibrates randomly, and then leads the pipe to vibrate mostly in the resonant frequency. Likely the same applies to bowed string instruments, the bow must be creating a random vibration.
- playing a plucked string instrument comes down to initializing the system to an triangular wave form and then letting it evolve. TODO find a simulation of that!
Another cool aspect of resonance is that it was kind of the motivation for de Broglie hypothesis, as de Broglie was kind of thinking that electroncs might show discrete jumps on atomic spectra because of constructive interference.
This basically adds one more ingredient to partial differential equations: a function that we can select.
And then the question becomes: if this function has such and such limitation, can we make the solution of the differential equation have such and such property?
Control theory also takes into consideration possible discretization of the domain, which allows using numerical methods to solve partial differential equations, as well as digital, rather than analogue control methods.
These people don't fuck around.
Lie Groups, Physics, and Geometry by Robert Gilmore (2008) 7.2 "The covering problem" gives some amazing intuition on the subject as usual.
A single exponential map is not enough to recover a simple Lie group from its algebra by
Ciro Santilli 40 Updated 2025-07-16
These often come pre-soldered on devboards, e.g. and allow for easy access to GPIO pins. E.g. they're present on the Raspberry Pi 2.
Why would someone ever sell a devboard without them pre-soldered!
6x1 pin header
. Source. Underside of a Raspberry Pi 2
. Source. At the top of this image we can clearly see how the usually pre-soldered pin header connectors go through the PCB and are soldered on both sides.We can almost reach the Lie algebra of any isometry group in a single go. For every in the Lie algebra we must have:because has to be in the isometry group by definition as shown at Section "Lie algebra of a matrix Lie group".
Bibliography:
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