next up previous
Next: Van der Pol's Equation Up: Taylor User's Manual Previous: Appendix A: Taylor Grammar

Appendix: The Taylor method

Taylor method is one of the best known one step method for solving ordinary differential equations numerically. The idea is to advance the solution using a truncated Taylor expansion of the variables about the current solution. Let

  eqnarray270

be an initial value problem and let h be the integration step. To find tex2html_wrap_inline603 , we expand tex2html_wrap_inline605 around tex2html_wrap_inline607 and obtain

  equation279

A numeric approximation of tex2html_wrap_inline603 is obtained by truncating (2) at a pre-determined order.

The main problem connected with the Taylor method is the need to compute higher derivatives tex2html_wrap_inline611 .



Maorong Zou
Tue Nov 13 09:42:48 CST 2001