Functional differentiation: Difference between revisions

Revision as of 12:31, 20 June 2007

Introduction

Functional differentiation means computing or approximating the deriviative of a function. There are several ways to do this:

Approximate the derivative $f^{'} (x)$ by $\frac{f (x + h) - f (x)}{h}$ where $h$ is close to zero. (or at best the square root of the machine precision $ε$ .
Compute the derivative of $f$ symbolically. This approach is particularly interesting for Haskell.

Blog Posts

There have been several blog posts on this recently. I think we should gather the information together and make a nice wiki article on it here. For now, here are links to articles on the topic.

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+== Introduction ==
+Functional differentiation means computing or approximating the deriviative of a function.
+There are several ways to do this:
+* Approximate the derivative <math>f'(x)</math> by <math>\frac{f(x+h)-f(x)}{h}</math> where <math>h</math> is close to zero. (or at best the square root of the machine precision <math>\varepsilon</math>.
+* Compute the derivative of <math>f</math> symbolically. This approach is particularly interesting for Haskell.
 == Blog Posts ==