Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-g7gxr Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-14T07:44:57.820Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Balls, boxes and solitary waves

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 August 2016

Paul R. Turner
Paul R. Turner*
Affiliation:
Department of Mathematics, Heriot-Watt University, Edinburgh EH 14 4AS
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

Water waves are familiar to all of us and we encounter them in a variety of guises in many places, be it crashing to shore at the beach, rippling concentrically outward where a pebble lands in a pond or simply splashing at the sides of the bath. The study of waves can be simplified by idealising them as graphs, each graph being thought of as a cross-section of a physical wave at an instant in time. A sequence of such graphs can represent the progress of the wave as time passes.

Type
Articles
Information
The Mathematical Gazette , Volume 87 , Issue 510 , November 2003 , pp. 468 - 476
Copyright
Copyright © The Mathematical Association 2003

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

1. Russell, J. Scott, Report on Waves, Report of the Fourteenth Meeting of the British Assocation for the Advancement of Science, John Murray (1844) pp. 311–390 + 57 plates.Google Scholar
2. Zabusky, N.J. and Kruskal, M.D., Interaction of ‘Solitons’ in a collisionless plasma and the recurrence of initial states, Phys. Rev. Lett., 15 (1965) pp. 240–243.Google Scholar
3. Brown, J., New Scientist (15 April 1995) pp. 36–40.Google Scholar
4. Scott, A., Nonlinear science, emergence and dynamics of coherent structures, Oxford University Press (1999).Google Scholar
5. Park, J.K., Steiglitz, K., Thurston, W.P., Soliton-like behaviour in automata, Phys. D 19 no. 3 (1986) pp. 423–432.Google Scholar
6. Takahashi, D., Satsuma, J., A soliton cellular automaton. J. Phys. Soc. Japan 59 no. 10 (1990) pp. 3514–3519.Google Scholar