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The vibrating inhomogeneous string: a topic for a course in Computational Physics

Computational Physics 2010-06-11 v1 Mathematical Physics math.MP

Abstract

This paper solves the integral equation which describes the oscillating inhomogeneous string, by using a spectral expansion method in terms of Chebyshev polynomials. The result is compared with the solution of the corresponding differential equation, obtained by expansion into a set of sine-wave functions, with emphasis on the accuracies of the two methods. These accuracies are determined by comparison with an iterative method which allows a precision of 1:10^11. The iterative method is based on a old method by Hartree, but contains innovative spectral expansion procedures.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1006.1913,
  title  = {The vibrating inhomogeneous string: a topic for a course in Computational Physics},
  author = {George Rawitscher and Jakob Liss},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1006.1913},
  year   = {2010}
}

Comments

Accepted for publication in American Journal of Physics

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