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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 ...
In this equation, we used sup and inf instead of max and min because the graph (,) does not have to be locally finite (i.e., to have finite degrees): a key example is when () is the set of points in a domain in , and (,) if their Euclidean distance is at most . The importance of this example lies in the following.
Using the Green's function for the three-variable Laplace operator, one can integrate the Poisson equation in order to determine the potential function. Green's functions can be expanded in terms of the basis elements (harmonic functions) which are determined using the separable coordinate systems for the linear partial differential equation ...
Examples of archetypal well-posed problems include the Dirichlet problem for Laplace's equation, and the heat equation with specified initial conditions. These might be regarded as 'natural' problems in that there are physical processes modelled by these problems.
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 ...
A solution to Laplace's equation defined on an annulus.The Laplace operator is the most famous example of an elliptic operator.. In the theory of partial differential equations, elliptic operators are differential operators that generalize the Laplace operator.
Examples of harmonic functions of two variables are: The real or imaginary part of any holomorphic function . The function f ( x , y ) = e x sin y ; {\displaystyle \,\!f(x,y)=e^{x}\sin y;} this is a special case of the example above, as f ( x , y ) = Im ( e x + i y ) , {\displaystyle f(x,y)=\operatorname {Im} \left(e^{x+iy}\right),} and ...