short of symbolic manipulation (e.g. maple), all we do is discretize and approximate, right?

Integration (aka quadrature) is "easy" but numerical diff is very unstable.  ODEs solve well w/ Runge-Kutta methods.





From: pharo-project-bounces@lists.gforge.inria.fr [pharo-project-bounces@lists.gforge.inria.fr] on behalf of David Shaffer [cdshaffer@acm.org]
Sent: Sunday, August 05, 2012 5:13 PM
To: Pharo-project@lists.gforge.inria.fr
Subject: Re: [Pharo-project] Differential and Integral calculus in Pharo?


On Aug 1, 2012, at 6:03 PM, Clara Allende wrote:

Hi guys, after having exhausting four months of Physics lessons, I decided that would be fun to write a program to deal with Electricity problems :) (Yeah, I'm not a normal person :P)

So, I need to make differential and integral calculus, are there any libraries to do so? Or any place that I can take a look at? 

Thanks in advance!

Cheers

In case you haven't already come across it:

http://sourceforge.net/projects/dhbnumerics/

In my personal experience the algorithms in the book are often naive and problematic compared to industrial-strength numerical algorithms but they are also quite often good enough for a first attempt at some numerical work.

David