series expansion- electricforceduetoaringofcharge（级数展开——electricforceduetoaringofcharge）（6页）.docVIP

Array Tools: Find and Interpolate Numerically we sometimes represent functions, f(x) as arrays of y data points and x data points. So, what’s the difference between y and f(x)? Functions are single valued and continuous whereas arrays of data points are not. From this, it might appear that functions would always be more useful than arrays because we can evaluate them for any x value, but this isn’t necessarily the case. Consider the command plot(x,y). This command only accepts arrays of data points. Why? Because some of the things we plot are not single valued functions. The plot below is an example of a graph where there are multiple y values for each x value. There is no function, f(x) that can produce this plot. We will find that for some physics problems functions are the best choice and for others arrays are the best choice. Today we’re going to explore some of the numerical tools to help us use both. The “find” command Sometimes we want to find a subset of the data points we’ve computed. Here’s an example. Lets look at the function sin(?) for 0?2?. theta = 0:pi/100:2*pi; plot(theta, sin(theta)); Now suppose that we want to plot just the data with 0sin(?)0.5. We’re going to have to “find” the data with 0sin(?) and sin(?) 0.5. ii = find(sin(theta)0 sin(theta)0.5); hold on plot(theta(ii),sin(theta(ii)),r-); hold off Oops, his has a horizontal red line between the two sections of the sin function that pass our criteria. We can get rid of it, but first let’s understand what we’ve done so far. First we had to find the parts of the theta array where sin(theta) met our criteria. The stuff inside the find() function is a logical statement that reads: “sin(theta) is greater than 0 and sin(theta) is less than 0.5.” Take a close look at this line of code. ii = find(sin(theta)0 sin(theta)0.5); The values, ii, are now the indices into the theta array where theta meets the logical criteria. Referring to theta(ii)will mean that