Brook Taylor

Brook Taylor (18 August 1685 – 29 December 1731) was an English mathematician best known for creating Taylor's theorem and the Taylor series, which are important for their use in mathematical analysis. Brook Taylor was born in Edmonton (former Middlesex). Taylor was the son of John Taylor, MP of Patrixbourne, Kent and Olivia Tempest, the daughter of Sir Nicholas Tempest, Baronet of Durham. He entered St John's College, Cambridge, as a fellow-commoner in 1701, and took degrees in LL.B. in 1709 and LL.D. in 1714. Taylor studied mathematics under John Machin and John Keill, leading to Taylor obtaining a solution to the problem of "center of oscillation." Taylor's solution remained unpublished until May 1714, when his claim to priority was disputed by Johann Bernoulli. Taylor's Methodus Incrementorum Directa et Inversa (1715) ("Direct and Indirect Methods of Incrementation") added a new branch to higher mathematics, called "calculus of finite differences". Taylor used this development to determine the form of movement in vibrating strings. Taylor also wrote the first satisfactory investigation of astronomical refraction. The same work contains the well-known Taylor's theorem, the importance of which remained unrecognized until 1772, when Joseph-Louis Lagrange realized its usefulness and termed it "the main foundation of differential calculus". In Taylor's 1715 essay Linear Perspective, Taylor set forth the principles of perspective in a more understandable form, but the work suffered from brevity and obscurity problems which plagued most of his writings, meaning the essay required further explanation in the treatises of Joshua Kirby (1754) and Daniel Fournier (1761). Taylor was elected as a fellow in the Royal Society in 1712. In the same year, Taylor sat on the committee for adjudicating the claims of Sir Isaac Newton and Gottfried Leibniz. He acted as secretary to the society from 13 January 1714 to 21 October 1718. From 1715 onward, Taylor's studies took a philosophical and religious bent.

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Characterization of high harmonic frequencies in reactor noise experiments within the CORTEX project

Andreas Pautz, Vincent Pierre Lamirand

We present a novel technique of neutron noise detection and experimental data interpretation developed during the EU H2020 project CORTEX aiming to improve the capabilities for identification and localization of neutron noise sources. The experimental data ...

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MATHICSE Technical Report : Regularity and sparse approximation of the recursive first moment equations for the lognormal Darcy problem

Fabio Nobile, Francesca Bonizzoni

We study the Darcy boundary value problem with log-normal permeability field. We adopt a perturbation approach, expanding the solution in Taylor series around the nominal value of the coefficient, and approximating the expected value of the stochastic solu ...

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Regularity and sparse approximation of the recursive first moment equations for the lognormal Darcy problem

Fabio Nobile, Francesca Bonizzoni

We study the Darcy boundary value problem with lognormal permeability field. We adopt a perturbation approach, expanding the solution in Taylor series around the nominal value of the coefficient, and approximating the expected value of the stochastic solut ...

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Finite difference

A finite difference is a mathematical expression of the form f (x + b) − f (x + a). If a finite difference is divided by b − a, one gets a difference quotient. The approximation of derivatives by finite differences plays a central role in finite difference methods for the numerical solution of differential equations, especially boundary value problems. The difference operator, commonly denoted is the operator that maps a function f to the function defined by A difference equation is a functional equation that involves the finite difference operator in the same way as a differential equation involves derivatives.

Taylor series

In mathematics, the Taylor series or Taylor expansion of a function is an infinite sum of terms that are expressed in terms of the function's derivatives at a single point. For most common functions, the function and the sum of its Taylor series are equal near this point. Taylor series are named after Brook Taylor, who introduced them in 1715. A Taylor series is also called a Maclaurin series when 0 is the point where the derivatives are considered, after Colin Maclaurin, who made extensive use of this special case of Taylor series in the mid-18th century.

Series (mathematics)

In mathematics, a series is, roughly speaking, the operation of adding infinitely many quantities, one after the other, to a given starting quantity. The study of series is a major part of calculus and its generalization, mathematical analysis. Series are used in most areas of mathematics, even for studying finite structures (such as in combinatorics) through generating functions. In addition to their ubiquity in mathematics, infinite series are also widely used in other quantitative disciplines such as physics, computer science, statistics and finance.

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