What Second Derivatives Are And What They Can Do For You

Previous supplemental reading for Why Stuff Can Orbit:

• How Differential Calculus Works
• How Mathematical Physics Works
• Everything Interesting There Is To Say About Springs

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This is another supplemental piece because it’s too much to include in the next bit of Why Stuff Can Orbit. I need some more stuff about how a mathematical physicist would look at something.

This is also a story about approximations. A lot of mathematics is really about approximations. I don’t mean numerical computing. We all know that when we compute we’re making approximations. We use 0.333333 instead of one-third and we use 3.141592 instead of π. But a lot of precise mathematics, what we call analysis, is also about approximations. We do this by a logical structure that works something like this: take something we want to prove. Now for every positive number ε we can find something — a point, a function, a curve — that’s no more than ε away from the thing we’re really interested in, and which is easier to work with. Then we prove whatever we want to with the easier-to-work-with thing. And since ε can be as tiny a positive number as we want, we can suppose ε is a tinier difference than we can hope to measure. And so the difference between the thing we’re interested in and the thing we’ve proved something interesting about is zero. (This is the part that feels like we’re pulling a scam. We’re not, but this is where it’s worth stopping and thinking about what we mean by “a difference between two things”. When you feel confident this isn’t a scam, continue.) So we proved whatever we proved about the thing we’re interested in. Take an analysis course and you will see this all the time.

When we get into mathematical physics we do a lot of approximating functions with polynomials. Why polynomials? Yes, because everything is polynomials. But also because polynomials make so much mathematical physics easy. Polynomials are easy to calculate, if you need numbers. Polynomials are easy to integrate and differentiate, if you need analysis. Here that’s the calculus that tells you about patterns of behavior. If you want to approximate a continuous function you can always do it with a polynomial. The polynomial might have to be infinitely long to approximate the entire function. That’s all right. You can chop it off after finitely many terms. This finite polynomial is still a good approximation. It’s just good for a smaller region than the infinitely long polynomial would have been.

Necessary qualifiers: pages 65 through 82 of any book on real analysis.

So. Let me get to functions. I’m going to use a function named ‘f’ because I’m not wasting my energy coming up with good names. (When we get back to the main Why Stuff Can Orbit sequence this is going to be ‘U’ for potential energy or ‘E’ for energy.) It’s got a domain that’s the real numbers, and a range that’s the real numbers. To express this in symbols I can write . If I have some number called ‘x’ that’s in the domain then I can tell you what number in the domain is matched by the function ‘f’ to ‘x’: it’s the number ‘f(x)’. You were expecting maybe 3.5? I don’t know that about ‘f’, not yet anyway. The one thing I do know about ‘f’, because I insist on it as a condition for appearing, is that it’s continuous. It hasn’t got any jumps, any gaps, any regions where it’s not defined. You could draw a curve representing it with a single, if wriggly, stroke of the pen.

I mean to build an approximation to the function ‘f’. It’s going to be a polynomial expansion, a set of things to multiply and add together that’s easy to find. To make this polynomial expansion this I need to choose some point to build the approximation around. Mathematicians call this the “point of expansion” because we froze up in panic when someone asked what we were going to name it, okay? But how are we going to make an approximation to a function if we don’t have some particular point we’re approximating around?

(One answer we find in grad school when we pick up some stuff from linear algebra we hadn’t been thinking about. We’ll skip it for now.)

I need a name for the point of expansion. I’ll use ‘a’. Many mathematicians do. Another popular name for it is ‘x₀‘. Or if you’re using some other variable name for stuff in the domain then whatever that variable is with subscript zero.

So my first approximation to the original function ‘f’ is … oh, shoot, I should have some new name for this. All right. I’m going to use ‘F⁰‘ as the name. This is because it’s one of a set of approximations, each of them a little better than the old. ‘F¹‘ will be better than ‘F⁰‘, but ‘F²‘ will be even better, and ‘F²⁰³⁸‘ will be way better yet. I’ll also say something about what I mean by “better”, although you’ve got some sense of that already.

I start off by calling the first approximation ‘F⁰‘ by the way because you’re going to think it’s too stupid to dignify with a number as big as ‘1’. Well, I have other reasons, but they’ll be easier to see in a bit. ‘F⁰‘, like all its sibling ‘Fⁿ‘ functions, has a domain of the real numbers and a range of the real numbers. The rule defining how to go from a number ‘x’ in the domain to some real number in the range?

That is, this first approximation is simply whatever the original function’s value is at the point of expansion. Notice that’s an ‘x’ on the left side of the equals sign and an ‘a’ on the right. This seems to challenge the idea of what an “approximation” even is. But it’s legit. Supposing something to be constant is often a decent working assumption. If you failed to check what the weather for today will be like, supposing that it’ll be about like yesterday will usually serve you well enough. If you aren’t sure where your pet is, you look first wherever you last saw the animal. (Or, yes, where your pet most loves to be. A particular spot, though.)

We can make this rigorous. A mathematician thinks this is rigorous: you pick any margin of error you like. Then I can find a region near enough to the point of expansion. The value for ‘f’ for every point inside that region is ‘f(a)’ plus or minus your margin of error. It might be a small region, yes. Doesn’t matter. It exists, no matter how tiny your margin of error was.

But yeah, that expansion still seems too cheap to work. My next approximation, ‘F¹‘, will be a little better. I mean that we can expect it will be closer than ‘F⁰‘ was to the original ‘f’. Or it’ll be as close for a bigger region around the point of expansion ‘a’. What it’ll represent is a line. Yeah, ‘F⁰‘ was a line too. But ‘F⁰‘ is a horizontal line. ‘F¹‘ might be a line at some completely other angle. If that works better. The second approximation will look like this:

Here ‘m’ serves its traditional yet poorly-explained role as the slope of a line. What the slope of that line should be we learn from the derivative of the original ‘f’. The derivative of a function is itself a new function, with the same domain and the same range. There’s a couple ways to denote this. Each way has its strengths and weaknesses about clarifying what we’re doing versus how much we’re writing down. And trying to write down almost anything can inspire confusion in analysis later on. There’s a part of analysis when you have to shift from thinking of particular problems to how problems work then.

So I will define a new function, spoken of as f-prime, this way:

If you look closely you realize there’s two different meanings of ‘x’ here. One is the ‘x’ that appears in parentheses. It’s the value in the domain of f and of f’ where we want to evaluate the function. The other ‘x’ is the one in the lower side of the derivative, in that . That’s my sloppiness, but it’s not uniquely mine. Mathematicians keep this straight by using the symbols so much they don’t even see the ‘x’ down there anymore so have no idea there’s anything to find confusing. Students keep this straight by guessing helplessly about what their instructors want and clinging to anything that doesn’t get marked down. Sorry. But what this means is to “take the derivative of the function ‘f’ with respect to its variable, and then, evaluate what that expression is for the value of ‘x’ that’s in parentheses on the left-hand side”. We can do some things that avoid the confusion in symbols there. They all require adding some more variables and some more notation in, and it looks like overkill for a measly definition like this.

Anyway. We really just want the deriviate evaluated at one point, the point of expansion. That is:

which by the way avoids that overloaded meaning of ‘x’ there. Put this together and we have what we call the tangent line approximation to the original ‘f’ at the point of expansion:

This is also called the tangent line, because it’s a line that’s tangent to the original function. A plot of ‘F¹‘ and the original function ‘f’ are guaranteed to touch one another only at the point of expansion. They might happen to touch again, but that’s luck. The tangent line will be close to the original function near the point of expansion. It might happen to be close again later on, but that’s luck, not design. Most stuff you might want to do with the original function you can do with the tangent line, but the tangent line will be easier to work with. It exactly matches the original function at the point of expansion, and its first derivative exactly matches the original function’s first derivative at the point of expansion.

We can do better. We can find a parabola, a second-order polynomial that approximates the original function. This will be a function ‘F²(x)’ that looks something like:

What we’re doing is adding a parabola to the approximation. This is that curve that looks kind of like a loosely-drawn U. The ‘m₂‘ there measures how spread out the U is. It’s not quite the slope, but it’s kind of like that, which is why I’m using the letter ‘m’ for it. Its value we get from the second derivative of the original ‘f’:

We find the second derivative of a function ‘f’ by evaluating the first derivative, and then, taking the derivative of that. We can denote it with two ‘ marks after the ‘f’ as long as we aren’t stuck wrapping the function name in ‘ marks to set it out. And so we can describe the function this way:

This will be a better approximation to the original function near the point of expansion. Or it’ll make larger the region where the approximation is good.

If the first derivative of a function at a point is zero that means the tangent line is horizontal. In physics stuff this is an equilibrium. The second derivative can tell us whether the equilibrium is stable or not. If the second derivative at the equilibrium is positive it’s a stable equilibrium. The function looks like a bowl open at the top. If the second derivative at the equilibrium is negative then it’s an unstable equilibrium.

We can make better approximations yet, by using even more derivatives of the original function ‘f’ at the point of expansion:

There’s better approximations yet. You can probably guess what the next, fourth-degree, polynomial would be. Or you can after I tell you the fraction in front of the new term will be . The only big difference is that after about the third derivative we give up on adding ‘ marks after the function name ‘f’. It’s just too many little dots. We start writing, like, ‘f^(iv)‘ instead. Or if the Roman numerals are too much then ‘f⁽²⁰³⁸⁾‘ instead. Or if we don’t want to pin things down to a specific value ‘f^(j)‘ with the understanding that ‘j’ is some whole number.

We don’t need all of them. In physics problems we get equilibriums from the first derivative. We get stability from the second derivative. And we get springs in the second derivative too. And that’s what I hope to pick up on in the next installment of the main series.

The End 2016 Mathematics A To Z: Weierstrass Function

I’ve teased this one before.

Weierstrass Function.

So you know how the Earth is a sphere, but from our normal vantage point right up close to its surface it looks flat? That happens with functions too. Here I mean the normal kinds of functions we deal with, ones with domains that are the real numbers or a Euclidean space. And ranges that are real numbers. The functions you can draw on a sheet of paper with some wiggly bits. Let the function wiggle as much as you want. Pick a part of it and zoom in close. That zoomed-in part will look straight. If it doesn’t look straight, zoom in closer.

We rely on this. Functions that are straight, or at least straight enough, are easy to work with. We can do calculus on them. We can do analysis on them. Functions with plots that look like straight lines are easy to work with. Often the best approach to working with the function you’re interested in is to approximate it with an easy-to-work-with function. I bet it’ll be a polynomial. That serves us well. Polynomials are these continuous functions. They’re differentiable. They’re smooth.

That thing about the Earth looking flat, though? That’s a lie. I’ve never been to any of the really great cuts in the Earth’s surface, but I have been to some decent gorges. I went to grad school in the Hudson River Valley. I’ve driven I-80 over Pennsylvania’s scariest bridges. There’s points where the surface of the Earth just drops a great distance between your one footstep and your last.

Functions do that too. We can have points where a function isn’t differentiable, where it’s impossible to define the direction it’s headed. We can have points where a function isn’t continuous, where it jumps from one region of values to another region. Everyone knows this. We can’t dismiss those as abberations not worthy of the name “function”; too many of them are too useful. Typically we handle this by admitting there’s points that aren’t continuous and we chop the function up. We make it into a couple of functions, each stretching from discontinuity to discontinuity. Between them we have continuous region and we can go about our business as before.

Then came the 19th century when things got crazy. This particular craziness we credit to Karl Weierstrass. Weierstrass’s name is all over 19th century analysis. He had that talent for probing the limits of our intuition about basic mathematical ideas. We have a calculus that is logically rigorous because he found great counterexamples to what we had assumed without proving.

The Weierstrass function challenges this idea that any function is going to eventually level out. Or that we can even smooth a function out into basically straight, predictable chunks in-between sudden changes of direction. The function is continuous everywhere; you can draw it perfectly without lifting your pen from paper. But it always looks like a zig-zag pattern, jumping around like it was always randomly deciding whether to go up or down next. Zoom in on any patch and it still jumps around, zig-zagging up and down. There’s never an interval where it’s always moving up, or always moving down, or even just staying constant.

Despite being continuous it’s not differentiable. I’ve described that casually as it being impossible to predict where the function is going. That’s an abuse of words, yes. The function is defined. Its value at a point isn’t any more random than the value of “x²” is for any particular x. The unpredictability I’m talking about here is a side effect of ignorance. Imagine I showed you a plot of “x²” with a part of it concealed and asked you to fill in the gap. You’d probably do pretty well estimating it. The Weierstrass function, though? No; your guess would be lousy. My guess would be lousy too.

That’s a weird thing to have happen. A century and a half later it’s still weird. It gets weirder. The Weierstrass function isn’t differentiable generally. But there are exceptions. There are little dots of differentiability, where the rate at which the function changes is known. Not intervals, though. Single points. This is crazy. Derivatives are about how a function changes. We work out what they should even mean by thinking of a function’s value on strips of the domain. Those strips are small, but they’re still, you know, strips. But on almost all of that strip the derivative isn’t defined. It’s only at isolated points, a set with measure zero, that this derivative even exists. It evokes the medieval Mysteries, of how we are supposed to try, even though we know we shall fail, to understand how God can have contradictory properties.

It’s not quite that Mysterious here. Properties like this challenge our intuition, if we’ve gotten any. Once we’ve laid out good definitions for ideas like “derivative” and “continuous” and “limit” and “function” we can work out whether results like this make sense. And they — well, they follow. We can avoid weird conclusions like this, but at the cost of messing up our definitions for what a “function” and other things are. Making those useless. For the mathematical world to make sense, we have to change our idea of what quite makes sense.

That’s all right. When we look close we realize the Earth around us is never flat. Even reasonably flat areas have slight rises and falls. The ends of properties are marked with curbs or ditches, and bordered by streets that rise to a center. Look closely even at the dirt and we notice that as level as it gets there are still rocks and scratches in the ground, clumps of dirt an infinitesimal bit higher here and lower there. The flatness of the Earth around us is a useful tool, but we miss a lot by pretending it’s everything. The Weierstrass function is one of the ways a student mathematician learns that while smooth, predictable functions are essential, there is much more out there.

The End 2016 Mathematics A To Z: Smooth

Mathematicians affect a pose of objectivity. We justify this by working on things whose truth we can know, and which must be true whenever we accept certain rules of deduction and certain definitions and axioms. This seems fair. But we choose to pay attention to things that interest us for particular reasons. We study things we like. My A To Z glossary term for today is about one of those things we like.

Smooth.

Functions. Not everything mathematicians do is functions. But functions turn up a lot. We need to set some rules. “A function” is so generic a thing we can’t handle it much. Narrow it down. Pick functions with domains that are numbers. Range too. By numbers I mean real numbers, maybe complex numbers. That gives us something.

There’s functions that are hard to work with. This is almost all of them, so we don’t touch them unless we absolutely must. But they’re functions that aren’t continuous. That means what you imagine. The value of the function at some point is wholly unrelated to its value at some nearby point. It’s hard to work with anything that’s unpredictable like that. Functions as well as people.

We like functions that are continuous. They’re predictable. We can make approximations. We can estimate the function’s value at some point using its value at some more convenient point. It’s easy to see why that’s useful for numerical mathematics, for calculations to approximate stuff. The dazzling thing is it’s useful analytically. We step into the Platonic-ideal world of pure mathematics. We have tools that let us work as if we had infinitely many digits of precision, for infinitely many numbers at once. And yet we use estimates and approximations and errors. We use them in ways to give us perfect knowledge; we get there by estimates.

Continuous functions are nice. Well, they’re nicer to us than functions that aren’t continuous. But there are even nicer functions. Functions nicer to us. A continuous function, for example, can have corners; it can change direction suddenly and without warning. A differentiable function is more predictable. It can’t have corners like that. Knowing the function well at one point gives us more information about what it’s like nearby.

The derivative of a function doesn’t have to be continuous. Grumble. It’s nice when it is, though. It makes the function easier to work with. It’s really nice for us when the derivative itself has a derivative. Nothing guarantees that the derivative of a derivative is continuous. But maybe it is. Maybe the derivative of the derivative has a derivative. That’s a function we can do a lot with.

A function is “smooth” if it has as many derivatives as we need for whatever it is we’re doing. And if those derivatives are continuous. If this seems loose that’s because it is. A proof for whatever we’re interested in might need only the original function and its first derivative. It might need the original function and its first, second, third, and fourth derivatives. It might need hundreds of derivatives. If we look through the details of the proof we might find exactly how many derivatives we need and how many of them need to be continuous. But that’s tedious. We save ourselves considerable time by saying the function is “smooth”, as in, “smooth enough for what we need”.

If we do want to specify how many continuous derivatives a function has we call it a “C^k function”. The C here means continuous. The ‘k’ means there are the number ‘k’ continuous derivatives of it. This is completely different from a “C^k function”, which would be one that’s a k-dimensional vector. Whether the “C” is boldface or not is important. A function might have infinitely many continuous derivatives. That we call a “C^∞ function”. That’s got wonderful properties, especially if the domain and range are complex-valued numbers. We couldn’t do Complex Analysis without it. Complex Analysis is the course students take after wondering how they’ll ever survive Real Analysis. It’s much easier than Real Analysis. Mathematics can be strange.

How Mathematical Physics Works: Another Course In 2200 Words

OK, I need some more background stuff before returning to the Why Stuff Can Orbit series. Last week I explained how to take derivatives, which is one of the three legs of a Calculus I course. Now I need to say something about why we take derivatives. This essay won’t really qualify you to do mathematical physics, but it’ll at least let you bluff your way through a meeting with one.

We care about derivatives because we’re doing physics a smart way. This involves thinking not about forces but instead potential energy. We have a function, called V or sometimes U, that changes based on where something is. If we need to know the forces on something we can take the derivative, with respect to position, of the potential energy.

The way I’ve set up these central force problems makes it easy to shift between physical intuition and calculus. Draw a scribbly little curve, something going up and down as you like, as long as it doesn’t loop back on itself. Also, don’t take the pen from paper. Also, no corners. That’s just cheating. Smooth curves. That’s your potential energy function. Take any point on this scribbly curve. If you go to the right a little from that point, is the curve going up? Then your function has a positive derivative at that point. Is the curve going down? Then your function has a negative derivative. Find some other point where the curve is going in the other direction. If it was going up to start, find a point where it’s going down. Somewhere in-between there must be a point where the curve isn’t going up or going down. The Intermediate Value Theorem says you’re welcome.

These points where the potential energy isn’t increasing or decreasing are the interesting ones. At least if you’re a mathematical physicist. They’re equilibriums. If whatever might be moving happens to be exactly there, then it’s not going to move. It’ll stay right there. Mathematically: the force is some fixed number times the derivative of the potential energy there. The potential energy’s derivative is zero there. So the force is zero and without a force nothing’s going to change. Physical intuition: imagine you laid out a track with exactly the shape of your curve. Put a marble at this point where the track isn’t rising and isn’t falling. Does the marble move? No, but if you’re not so sure about that read on past the next paragraph.

Mathematical physicists learn to look for these equilibriums. We’re taught to not bother with what will happen if we release this particle at this spot with this velocity. That is, you know, not looking at any particular problem someone might want to know. We look instead at equilibriums because they help us describe all the possible behaviors of a system. Mathematicians are sometimes characterized as lazy in spirit. This is fair. Mathematicians will start out with a problem looking to see if it’s just like some other problem someone already solved. But the flip side is if one is going to go to the trouble of solving a new problem, she’s going to really solve it. We’ll work out not just what happens from some one particular starting condition. We’ll try to describe all the different kinds of thing that could happen, and how to tell which of them does happen for your measly little problem.

If you actually do have a curvy track and put a marble down on its equilibrium it might yet move. Suppose the track is rising a while and then falls back again; putting the marble at top and it’s likely to roll one way or the other. If it doesn’t it’s probably because of friction; the track sticks a little. If it were a really smooth track and the marble perfectly round then it’d fall. Give me this. But even with a perfectly smooth track and perfectly frictionless marble it’ll still roll one way or another. Unless you put it exactly at the spot that’s the top of the hill, not a bit to the left or the right. Good luck.

What’s happening here is the difference between a stable and an unstable equilibrium. This is again something we all have a physical intuition for. Imagine you have something that isn’t moving. Give it a little shove. Does it stay about like it was? Then it’s stable. Does it break? Then it’s unstable. The marble at the top of the track is at an unstable equilibrium; a little nudge and it’ll roll away. If you had a marble at the bottom of a track, inside a valley, then it’s a stable equilibrium. A little nudge will make the marble rock back and forth but it’ll stay nearby.

Yes, if you give it a crazy big whack the marble will go flying off, never to be seen again. We’re talking about small nudges. No, smaller than that. This maybe sounds like question-begging to you. But what makes for an unstable equilibrium is that no nudge is too small. The nudge — perturbation, in the trade — will just keep growing. In a stable equilibrium there’s nudges small enough that they won’t keep growing. They might not shrink, but they won’t grow either.

So how to tell which is which? Well, look at your potential energy and imagine it as a track with a marble again. Where are the unstable equilibriums? They’re the ones at tops of hills. Near them the curve looks like a cup pointing down, to use the metaphor every Calculus I class takes. Where are the stable equilibriums? They’re the ones at bottoms of valleys. Near them the curve looks like a cup pointing up. Again, see Calculus I.

We may be able to tell the difference between these kinds of equilibriums without drawing the potential energy. We can use the second derivative. To find the second derivative of a function you take the derivative of a function and then — you may want to think this one over — take the derivative of that. That is, you take the derivative of the original function a second time. Sometimes higher mathematics gives us terms that aren’t too hard.

So if you have a spot where you know there’s an equilibrium, look at what the second derivative at that spot is. If it’s positive, you have a stable equilibrium. If it’s negative, you have an unstable equilibrium. This is called “Second Derivative Test”, as it was named by a committee that figured it was close enough to 5 pm and why cause trouble?

If the second derivative is zero there, um, we can’t say anything right now. The equilibrium may also be an inflection point. That’s where the growth of something pauses a moment before resuming. Or where the decline of something pauses a moment before resuming. In either case that’s still an unstable equilibrium. But it doesn’t have to be. It could still be a stable equilibrium. It might just have a very smoothly flat base. No telling just from that one piece of information and this is why we have to go on to other work.

But this gets at how we’d like to look at a system. We look for its equilibriums. We figure out which equilibriums are stable and which ones are unstable. With a little more work we can say, if the system starts out like this it’ll stay near that equilibrium. If it starts out like that it’ll stay near this whole other equilibrium. If it starts out this other way, it’ll go flying off to the end of the universe. We can solve every possible problem at once and never have to bother with a particular case. This feels good.

It also gives us a little something more. You maybe have heard of a tangent line. That’s a line that’s, er, tangent to a curve. Again with the not-too-hard terms. What this means is there’s a point, called the “point of tangency”, again named by a committee that wanted to get out early. And the line just touches the original curve at that point, and it’s going in exactly the same direction as the original curve at that point. Typically this means the line just grazes the curve, at least around there. If you’ve ever rolled a pencil until it just touched the edge of your coffee cup or soda can, you’ve set up a tangent line to the curve of your beverage container. You just didn’t think of it as that because you’re not daft. Fair enough.

Mathematicians will use tangents because a tangent line has values that are so easy to calculate. The function describing a tangent line is a polynomial and we llllllllove polynomials, correctly. The tangent line is always easy to understand, however hard the original function was. Its value, at the equilibrium, is exactly what the original function’s was. Its first derivative, at the equilibrium, is exactly what the original function’s was at that point. Its second derivative is zero, which might or might not be true of the original function. We don’t care.

We don’t use tangent lines when we look at equilibriums. This is because in this case they’re boring. If it’s an equilibrium then its tangent line is a horizontal line. No matter what the original function was. It’s trivial: you know the answer before you’ve heard the question.

Ah, but, there is something mathematical physicists do like. The tangent line is boring. Fine. But how about, using the second derivative, building a tangent … well, “parabola” is the proper term. This is a curve that’s a quadratic, that looks like an open bowl. It exactly matches the original function at the equilibrium. Its derivative exactly matches the original function’s derivative at the equilibrium. Its second derivative also exactly matches the original function’s second derivative, though. Third derivative we don’t care about. It’s so not important here I can’t even finish this sentence in a

What this second-derivative-based approximation gives us is a parabola. It will look very much like the original function if we’re close to the equilibrium. And this gives us something great. The great thing is this is the same potential energy shape of a weight on a spring, or anything else that oscillates back and forth. It’s the potential energy for “simple harmonic motion”.

And that’s great. We start studying simple harmonic motion, oh, somewhere in high school physics class because it’s so much fun to play with slinkies and springs and accidentally dropping weights on our lab partners. We never stop. The mathematics behind it is simple. It turns up everywhere. If you understand the mathematics of a mass on a spring you have a tool that relevant to pretty much every problem you ever have. This approximation is part of that. Close to a stable equilibrium, whatever system you’re looking at has the same behavior as a weight on a spring.

It may strike you that a mass on a spring is itself a central force. And now I’m saying that within the central force problem I started out doing, stuff that orbits, there’s another central force problem. This is true. You’ll see that in a few Why Stuff Can Orbit essays.

So far, by the way, I’ve talked entirely about a potential energy with a single variable. This is for a good reason: two or more variables is harder. Well of course it is. But the basic dynamics are still open. There’s equilibriums. They can be stable or unstable. They might have inflection points. There is a new kind of behavior. Mathematicians call it a “saddle point”. This is where in one direction the potential energy makes it look like a stable equilibrium while in another direction the potential energy makes it look unstable. Examples of it kind of look like the shape of a saddle, if you haven’t looked at an actual saddle recently. (If you really want to know, get your computer to plot the function z = x² – y² and look at the origin, where x = 0 and y = 0.) Well, there’s points on an actual saddle that would be saddle points to a mathematician. It’s unstable, because there’s that direction where it’s definitely unstable.

So everything about multivariable functions is longer, and a couple bits of it are harder. There’s more chances for weird stuff to happen. I think I can get through most of Why Stuff Can Orbit without having to know that. But do some reading up on that before you take a job as a mathematical physicist.

How Differential Calculus Works

I’m at a point in my Why Stuff Can Orbit essays where I need to talk about derivatives. If I don’t then I’m going to be stuck with qualitative talk that’s too hard to focus on anything. But it’s a big subject. It’s about two-fifths of a Freshman Calculus course and one of the two main legs of calculus. So I want to pull out a quick essay explaining the important stuff.

Derivatives, also called differentials, are about how things change. By “things” I mean “functions”. And particularly I mean functions which have as a domain that’s in the real numbers and a range that’s in the real numbers. That’s the starting point. We can define derivatives for functions with domains or ranges that are vectors of real numbers, or that are complex-valued numbers, or are even more exotic kinds of numbers. But those ideas are all built on the derivatives for real-valued functions. So if you get really good at them, everything else is easy.

Derivatives are the part of calculus where we study how functions change. They’re blessed with some easy-to-visualize interpretations. Suppose you have a function that describes where something is at a given time. Then its derivative with respect to time is the thing’s velocity. You can build a pretty good intuitive feeling for derivatives that way. I won’t stop you from it.

A function’s derivative is itself a function. The derivative doesn’t have to be constant, although it’s possible. Sometimes the derivative is positive. This means the original function increases as whatever its variable is increases. Sometimes the derivative is negative. This means the original function decreases as its variable increases. If the derivative is a big number this means it’s increasing or decreasing fast. If the derivative is a small number it’s increasing or decreasing slowly. If the derivative is zero then the function isn’t increasing or decreasing, at least not at this particular value of the variable. This might be a local maximum, where the function’s got a larger value than it has anywhere else nearby. It might be a local minimum, where the function’s got a smaller value than it has anywhere else nearby. Or it might just be a little pause in the growth or shrinkage of the function. No telling, at least not just from knowing the derivative is zero.

Derivatives tell you something about where the function is going. We can, and in practice often do, make approximations to a function that are built on derivatives. Many interesting functions are real pains to calculate. Derivatives let us make polynomials that are as good an approximation as we need and that a computer can do for us instead.

Derivatives can change rapidly. That’s all right. They’re functions in their own right. Sometimes they change more rapidly and more extremely than the original function did. Sometimes they don’t. Depends what the original function was like.

Not every function has a derivative. Functions that have derivatives don’t necessarily have them at every point. A function has to be continuous to have a derivative. A function that jumps all over the place doesn’t really have a direction, not that differential calculus will let us suss out. But being continuous isn’t enough. The function also has to be … well, we call it “differentiable”. The word at least tells us what the property is good for, even if it doesn’t say how to tell if a function is differentiable. The function has to not have any corners, points where the direction suddenly and unpredictably changes.

Otherwise differentiable functions can have some corners, some non-differentiable points. For instance the height of a bouncing ball, over time, looks like a bunch of upside-down U-like shapes that suddenly rebound off the floor and go up again. Those points interrupting the upside-down U’s aren’t differentiable, even though the rest of the curve is.

It’s possible to make functions that are nothing but corners and that aren’t differentiable anywhere. These are done mostly to win quarrels with 19th century mathematicians about the nature of the real numbers. We use them in Real Analysis to blow students’ minds, and occasionally after that to give a fanciful idea a hard test. In doing real-world physics we usually don’t have to think about them.

So why do we do them? Because they tell us how functions change. They can tell us where functions momentarily don’t change, which are usually important. And equations with differentials in them, known in the trade as “differential equations”. They’re also known to mathematics majors as “diffy Q’s”, a name which delights everyone. Diffy Q’s let us describe physical systems where there’s any kind of feedback. If something interacts with its surroundings, that interaction’s probably described by differential equations.

So how do we do them? We start with a function that we’ll call ‘f’ because we’re not wasting more of our lives figuring out names for functions and we’re feeling smugly confident Turkish authorities aren’t interested in us.

Turkey bans books that include random F and G letters in math problems — initials of Fethullah Gulen. https://t.co/S7YwxYLxDH

— Mahir Zeynalov (@MahirZeynalov) October 6, 2016

f’s domain is real numbers, for example, the one we’ll call ‘x’. Its range is also real numbers. f(x) is some number in that range. It’s the one that the function f matches with the domain’s value of x. We read f(x) aloud as “the value of f evaluated at the number x”, if we’re pretending or trying to scare Freshman Calculus classes. Really we say “f of x” or maybe “f at x”.

There’s a couple ways to write down the derivative of f. First, for example, we say “the derivative of f with respect to x”. By that we mean how does the value of f(x) change if there’s a small change in x. That difference matters if we have a function that depends on more than one variable, if we had an “f(x, y)”. Having several variables for f changes stuff. Mostly it makes the work longer but not harder. We don’t need that here.

But there’s a couple ways to write this derivative. The best one if it’s a function of one variable is to put a little ‘ mark: f'(x). We pronounce that “f-prime of x”. That’s good enough if there’s only the one variable to worry about. We have other symbols. One we use a lot in doing stuff with differentials looks for all the world like a fraction. We spend a lot of time in differential calculus explaining why it isn’t a fraction, and then in integral calculus we do some shady stuff that treats it like it is. But that’s . This also appears as . If you encounter this do not cross out the d’s from the numerator and denominator. In this context the d’s are not numbers. They’re actually operators, which is what we call a function whose domain is functions. They’re notational quirks is all. Accept them and move on.

How do we calculate it? In Freshman Calculus we introduce it with this expression involving limits and fractions and delta-symbols (the Greek letter that looks like a triangle). We do that to scare off students who aren’t taking this stuff seriously. Also we use that formal proper definition to prove some simple rules work. Then we use those simple rules. Here’s some of them.

1. The derivative of something that doesn’t change is 0.
2. The derivative of xⁿ, where n is any constant real number — positive, negative, whole, a fraction, rational, irrational, whatever — is n x^n-1.
3. If f and g are both functions and have derivatives, then the derivative of the function f plus g is the derivative of f plus the derivative of g. This probably has some proper name but it’s used so much it kind of turns invisible. I dunno. I’d call it something about linearity because “linearity” is what happens when adding stuff works like adding numbers does.
4. If f and g are both functions and have derivatives, then the derivative of the function f times g is the derivative of f times the original g plus the original f times the derivative of g. This is called the Product Rule.
5. If f and g are both functions and have derivatives we might do something called composing them. That is, for a given x we find the value of g(x), and then we put that value in to f. That we write as f(g(x)). For example, “the sine of the square of x”. Well, the derivative of that with respect to x is the derivative of f evaluated at g(x) times the derivative of g. That is, f'(g(x)) times g'(x). This is called the Chain Rule and believe it or not this turns up all the time.
6. If f is a function and C is some constant number, then the derivative of C times f(x) is just C times the derivative of f(x), that is, C times f'(x). You don’t really need this as a separate rule. If you know the Product Rule and that first one about the derivatives of things that don’t change then this follows. But who wants to go through that many steps for a measly little result like this?
7. Calculus textbooks say there’s this Quotient Rule for when you divide f by g but you know what? The one time you’re going to need it it’s easier to work out by the Product Rule and the Chain Rule and your life is too short for the Quotient Rule. Srsly.
8. There’s some functions with special rules for the derivative. You can work them out from the Real And Proper Definition. Or you can work them out from infinitely-long polynomial approximations that somehow make sense in context. But what you really do is just remember the ones anyone actually uses. The derivative of e^x is e^x and we love it for that. That’s why e is that 2.71828(etc) number and not something else. The derivative of the natural log of x is 1/x. That’s what makes it natural. The derivative of the sine of x is the cosine of x. That’s if x is measured in radians, which it always is in calculus, because it makes that work. The derivative of the cosine of x is minus the sine of x. Again, radians. The derivative of the tangent of x is um the square of the secant of x? I dunno, look that sucker up. The derivative of the arctangent of x is and you know what? The calculus book lists this in a table in the inside covers. Just use that. Arctangent. Sheesh. We just made up the “secant” and the “cosecant” to haze Freshman Calculus students anyway. We don’t get a lot of fun. Let us have this. Or we’ll make you hear of the inverse hyperbolic cosecant.

So. What’s this all mean for central force problems? Well, here’s what the effective potential energy V(r) usually looks like:

So, first thing. The variable here is ‘r’. The variable name doesn’t matter. It’s just whatever name is convenient and reminds us somehow why we’re talking about this number. We adapt our rules about derivatives with respect to ‘x’ to this new name by striking out ‘x’ wherever it appeared and writing in ‘r’ instead.

Second thing. C is a constant. So is n. So is L and so is m. 2 is also a constant, which you never think about until a mathematician brings it up. That second term is a little complicated in form. But what it means is “a constant, which happens to be the number , multiplied by r^-2”.

So the derivative of V_eff, with respect to r, is the derivative of the first term plus the derivative of the second. The derivatives of each of those terms is going to be some constant time r to another number. And that’s going to be:

And there you can divide the 2 in the numerator and the 2 in the denominator. So we could make this look a little simpler yet, but don’t worry about that.

OK. So that’s what you need to know about differential calculus to understand orbital mechanics. Not everything. Just what we need for the next bit.

Letting The Computer Do The Hard Work

Sometime in late August or early September 1994 I had one of those quietly astounding moments on a computer. It would have been while using Maple, a program capable of doing symbolic mathematics. It was something capable not just working out what the product of two numbers is, but of holding representations of functions and working out what the product of those functions was. That’s striking enough, but more was to come: I could describe a function and have Maple do the work of symbolically integrating it. That was astounding then, and it really ought to be yet. Let me explain why.

It’s fairly easy to think of symbolic representations of functions: if f(x) equals , well, you know if I give you some value for x, you can give me back an f(x), and if you’re a little better you can describe, roughly, a plot of x versus f(x). That is, that’s the plot of all the points on the plane for which the value of the x-coordinate and the value of the y-coordinate make the statement “” a true statement.

If you’ve gotten into calculus, though, you’d like to know other things: the derivative, for example, of f(x). That is (among other interpretations), if I give you some value for x, you can tell me how quickly f(x) is changing at that x. Working out the derivative of a function is a bit of work, but it’s not all that hard; there’s maybe a half-dozen or so rules you have to follow, plus some basic cases where you learn what the derivative of x to a power is, or what the derivative of the sine is, or so on. (You don’t really need to learn those basic cases, but it saves you a lot of work if you do.) It takes some time to learn them, and what order to apply them in, but once you do it’s almost automatic. If you’re smart you might do some problems better, but, you don’t have to be smart, just indefatigable.

Integrating a function (among other interpretations, that’s finding the amount of area underneath a curve) is different, though, even though it’s kind of an inverse of finding the derivative. If you integrate a function, and then take its derivative, you get back the original function, unless you did it wrong. (For various reasons if you take a derivative and then integrate you won’t necessarily get back the original function, but you’ll get something close to it.) However, that integration is still really, really hard. There are rules to follow, yes, but despite that it’s not necessarily obvious what to do, or why to do it, and even if you do know the various rules and use them perfectly you’re not necessarily guaranteed to get an answer. Being indefatigable might help, but you also need to be smart.

So, it’s easy to imagine writing a computer program that can find a derivative; to find an integral, though? That’s amazing, and still is amazing. And that brings me at last to this tweet from @mathematicsprof:

Wonder how Wolframalpha finds all those nasty anti-derivatives? Symbolic integration, Louiville to Risch -> http://t.co/vpirsn2g1E

— math prof (@mathematicsprof) September 18, 2014

The document linked to by this is a master’s thesis, titled Symbolic Integration, prepared by one Björn Terelius for the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm. It’s a fair-sized document, but it does open with a history of computers that work out integrals that anyone ought to be able to follow. It goes on to describe the logic behind algorithms that do this sor of calculation, though, and should be quite helpful in understanding just how it is the computer does this amazing thing.

(For a bonus, it also contains a short proof of why you can’t integrate , one of those functions that looks nice and easy and that drives you crazy in Calculus II when you give it your best try.)