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The calculus of variations began with the work of Isaac Newton, such as with Newton's minimal resistance problem, which he formulated and solved in 1685, and published in his Principia in 1687, [2] which was the first problem in the field to be clearly formulated and correctly solved, and was one of the most difficult problems tackled by variational methods prior to the twentieth century.
In calculus, a branch of mathematics, the third derivative or third-order derivative is the rate at which the second derivative, or the rate of change of the rate of change, is changing. The third derivative of a function y = f ( x ) {\displaystyle y=f(x)} can be denoted by
The higher order derivatives can be applied in physics; for example, while the first derivative of the position of a moving object with respect to time is the object's velocity, how the position changes as time advances, the second derivative is the object's acceleration, how the velocity changes as time advances.
The second derivative of a function f can be used to determine the concavity of the graph of f. [2] A function whose second derivative is positive is said to be concave up (also referred to as convex), meaning that the tangent line near the point where it touches the function will lie below the graph of the function.
It can matter, looking at the first-order terms, which is applied first. This leads to the construction of pathological examples in which second derivatives are non-symmetric. This kind of example belongs to the theory of real analysis where the pointwise value of functions matters.
See the example figure on the right. Appended to this nonlinear edge is an edge weight that is the second-order partial derivative of the nonlinear node in relation to its predecessors. This nonlinear edge is subsequently pushed down to further predecessors in such a way that when it reaches the independent nodes, its edge weight is the second ...
However, because integration is the inverse operation of differentiation, Lagrange's notation for higher order derivatives extends to integrals as well. Repeated integrals of f may be written as f ( − 1 ) ( x ) {\displaystyle f^{(-1)}(x)} for the first integral (this is easily confused with the inverse function f − 1 ( x ) {\displaystyle f ...
In the calculus of variations and classical mechanics, the Euler–Lagrange equations [1] are a system of second-order ordinary differential equations whose solutions are stationary points of the given action functional. The equations were discovered in the 1750s by Swiss mathematician Leonhard Euler and Italian mathematician Joseph-Louis Lagrange.