PART D

Complex Analysis

image

Complex analysis has many applications in heat conduction, fluid flow, electrostatics, and in other areas. It extends the familiar “real calculus” to “complex calculus” by introducing complex numbers and functions. While many ideas carry over from calculus to complex analysis, there is a marked difference between the two. For example, analytic functions, which are the “good functions” (differentiable in some domain) of complex analysis, have derivatives of all orders. This is in contrast to calculus, where real-valued functions of real variables may have derivatives only up to a certain order. Thus, in certain ways, problems that are difficult to solve in real calculus may be much easier to solve in complex analysis. Complex analysis is important in applied mathematics for three main reasons:

1. Two-dimensional potential problems can be modeled and solved by methods of analytic functions. This reason is the real and imaginary parts of analytic functions satisfy Laplace's equation in two real variables.

2. Many difficult integrals (real or complex) that appear in applications can be solved quite elegantly ...

Get Advanced Engineering Mathematics, 10th Edition now with the O’Reilly learning platform.

O’Reilly members experience books, live events, courses curated by job role, and more from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers.