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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.
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.
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.
In mathematics, mathematical physics and the theory of stochastic processes, a harmonic function is a twice continuously differentiable function:, where U is an open subset of , that satisfies Laplace's equation, that is, + + + = everywhere on U.
For example, in Laplace's equation with Dirichlet boundary conditions, F would be the Laplacian operator in a region R, G would be an operator that restricts y to the boundary of R, and z would be the function that y is required to equal on the boundary of R.
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 ...
However, the converse is not true; not every vector field that satisfies Laplace's equation is a Laplacian vector field, which can be a point of confusion. For example, the vector field v = ( x y , y z , z x ) {\displaystyle {\bf {v}}=(xy,yz,zx)} satisfies Laplace's equation, but it has both nonzero divergence and nonzero curl and is not a ...
In mathematics and mathematical physics, potential theory is the study of harmonic functions.. The term "potential theory" was coined in 19th-century physics when it was realized that two fundamental forces of nature known at the time, namely gravity and the electrostatic force, could be modeled using functions called the gravitational potential and electrostatic potential, both of which ...