A Gentle Introduction to the Laplacian

The Laplace operator was first applied to the study of celestial mechanics, or the motion of objects in outer space, by Pierre-Simon de Laplace, and as such has been named after him. The Laplace operator has since been used to describe many different phenomena, from electric potentials, to the diffusion equation for heat and fluid flow, and quantum mechanics. It has also been recasted to the discrete space, where it has been used in applications related to image processing and spectral clustering. In this tutorial, you will discover a gentle introduction to the Laplacian. A Gentle Introduction to the Laplacian Photo by Aziz Acharki, some rights reserved.