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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.
Diagram illustrating the image method for Laplace's equation for a sphere of radius R. The green point is a charge q lying inside the sphere at a distance p from the origin, the red point is the image of that point, having charge −qR/p, lying outside the sphere at a distance of R 2 /p from the origin. The potential produced by the two charges ...
Relaxation methods are used to solve the linear equations resulting from a discretization of the differential equation, for example by finite differences. [ 2 ] [ 3 ] [ 4 ] Iterative relaxation of solutions is commonly dubbed smoothing because with certain equations, such as Laplace's equation , it resembles repeated application of a local ...
They have solved numerous problems which exhibit circular cylindrical symmetry employing the toroidal functions. The above expressions for the Green's function for the three-variable Laplace operator are examples of single summation expressions for this Green's function. There are also single-integral expressions for this Green's function.
The cylindrical harmonics for (k,n) are now the product of these solutions and the general solution to Laplace's equation is given by a linear combination of these solutions: (,,) = | | (,) (,) where the () are constants with respect to the cylindrical coordinates and the limits of the summation and integration are determined by the boundary ...
Laplace's equation on is an example of a partial differential equation that admits solutions through -separation of variables; in the three-dimensional case this uses 6-sphere coordinates. (This should not be confused with the case of a separable ODE, which refers to a somewhat different class of problems that can be broken into a pair of ...
Perhaps the most celebrated example is Shizuo Kakutani's 1944 solution of the Dirichlet problem for the Laplace operator using Brownian motion. However, it turns out that for a large class of semi-elliptic second-order partial differential equations the associated Dirichlet boundary value problem can be solved using an Itō process that solves ...
Solutions of the Laplace equation, i.e. functions whose Laplacian is identically zero, thus represent possible equilibrium densities under diffusion. The Laplace operator itself has a physical interpretation for non-equilibrium diffusion as the extent to which a point represents a source or sink of chemical concentration, in a sense made ...