derivations (7)

Understandably, program sources rarely derive the mathematical formulas they use. Not wishing to take the formulas on faith, a user might nevertheless reasonably wish to see such formulas somewhere derived.

Derivations of Applied Mathematics is a book which documents and derives many of the mathematical formulas and methods implemented in free software or used in science and engineering generally. It documents and derives the Taylor series (used to calculate trigonometrics), the Newton-Raphson method (used to calculate square roots), the Pythagorean theorem (used to calculate distances) and many others.

Among other ways, you can read the book on your computer screen by opening the file /usr/share/doc/derivations/derivations.ps.gz with the gv(1) program under X(7). To print the book on a standard postscript printer, just zcat(1) then lpr(1) the same file.

/usr/share/doc/derivations/derivations.ps.gz

the book in postscript format

/usr/share/doc/derivations/derivations.pdf.gz

the book in PDF

The book is a work in progress.

The book and this manpage are written by Thaddeus H. Black, who also maintains the Debian package derivations in which they are distributed. Users who need to contact the author in his role as Debian package maintainer can reach him at <[email protected]>. However, most e-mail will naturally be about the book itself: this should be sent to <[email protected]>.

Copyright (C) 1983-2010 Thaddeus H. Black.

The book, this manpage and the entire derivations distribution are free software. You can redistribute them and/or modify them under the terms of the GNU General Public License, version 2.

gv(1) [gv], zcat(1) [gzip], psselect(1) [psutils], lpr(1) [lpr], octave(1) [octave]