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The Hodge Laplacian, also known as the Laplace–de Rham operator, is a differential operator acting on differential forms. (Abstractly, it is a second order operator on each exterior power of the cotangent bundle.) This operator is defined on any manifold equipped with a Riemannian- or pseudo-Riemannian metric.
In mathematics and physics, Laplace's equation is a second-order partial differential equation named after Pierre-Simon Laplace, who first studied its properties.This is often written as = or =, where = = is the Laplace operator, [note 1] is the divergence operator (also symbolized "div"), is the gradient operator (also symbolized "grad"), and (,,) is a twice-differentiable real-valued function.
The Laplace operator is a second-order differential operator in the n-dimensional Euclidean space, defined as the divergence of the gradient (). Thus if f {\displaystyle f} is a twice-differentiable real-valued function , then the Laplacian of f {\displaystyle f} is the real-valued function defined by:
In this case the first-order errors cancel, so the slope of these secant lines differ from the slope of the tangent line by an amount that is approximately proportional to . Hence for small values of h this is a more accurate approximation to the tangent line than the one-sided estimation.
The wave equation is a second-order linear partial differential equation for the description of waves or standing wave fields such as mechanical waves (e.g. water waves, sound waves and seismic waves) or electromagnetic waves (including light waves). It arises in fields like acoustics, electromagnetism, and fluid dynamics.
Verbally, the second version is the second derivative in the direction of the gradient. In the case of the infinity Laplace equation Δ ∞ u = 0 {\displaystyle \Delta _{\infty }u=0} , the two definitions are equivalent.
For any twice-differentiable real-valued function f defined on Euclidean space R n, the Laplace operator (also known as the Laplacian) takes f to the divergence of its gradient vector field, which is the sum of the n pure second derivatives of f with respect to each vector of an orthonormal basis for R n.
The second derivative of a function f can be used to determine the concavity of the graph of f. [2] A function whose second derivative is positive is said to be concave up (also referred to as convex), meaning that the tangent line near the point where it touches the function will lie below the graph of the function.