Live data from Hacker News

PDEs you should know

lucaspauker.com

101–102 of 102 posts

Re: PDEs you should know

#101

PDEs are really useful if you are in the rare domains where they are useful. But most PDEs don't have even have closed form solutions for non-trivial boundary conditions. So unless you are a physicist or something adjacent, no, no you really don't need to know these. Hard to say what's the intended audience for the page though. Could be a message aimed at physics undergrads or something. If so, then indeed, you shoul…

> Could be a message aimed at physics undergrads or something.

The Black Scholes equation is present though, which is used in pricing securities in financial markets. Perhaps this page is aimed at physicists who intend on jumping ship to become a quant!

Re: PDEs you should know

#102
post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The fun thing is that a PDE’s solution is emergent by definition: it is an interplay of the dynamics (specified by the the PDE), the boundary conditions, initial conditions, and maybe a forcing function (energy or information pump). Change one of those things and you’ll get a different solution. You might be reminded of fractals, which are a special case of iterated function systems, roughly a discrete version of ite…

Ok but the wave equation doesn't have a term to represent the area of information you have in the system right ?

Nope. That’s encoded in boundary conditions, initial conditions, and the forcing function. The wave equation just says how these things interact.
Post reply on HN