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Functional differentiation

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* [http://sigfpe.blogspot.com/2005/07/automatic-differentiation.html Automatic Differentiation]
* [http://sigfpe.blogspot.com/2005/07/automatic-differentiation.html Automatic Differentiation]
* [http://cdsmith.wordpress.com/2007/11/29/some-playing-with-derivatives/ Some Playing with Derivatives]
* [http://cdsmith.wordpress.com/2007/11/29/some-playing-with-derivatives/ Some Playing with Derivatives]
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* [http://conal.net/blog/posts/paper-beautiful-differentiation/ Beautiful differentiation by Conal Elliott.] The paper itself and link to video of ICFP talk on the subject are available from his [http://conal.net/papers/beautiful-differentiation/ site].
== Code ==
== Code ==

Revision as of 18:17, 8 December 2010

Contents

1 Introduction

Functional differentiation means computing or approximating the derivative of a function. There are several ways to do this:

  • Approximate the derivative f'(x) by \frac{f(x+h)-f(x)}{h} where h is close to zero. (or at best the square root of the machine precision \varepsilon.
  • Compute the derivative of f symbolically. This approach is particularly interesting for Haskell.

2 Functional analysis

If you want to explain the terms Higher order function and Currying to mathematicians, this is certainly a good example. The mathematician writes

D f (x) = \lim_{h\to 0} \frac{f(x+h)-f(x)}{h}

and the Haskell programmer writes 

derive :: a -> (a -> a) -> (a -> a)
derive h f x = (f (x+h) - f x) / h    .
Haskell's
derive h
approximates the mathematician's D.

In functional analysis D is called a (linear) function operator, because it maps functions to functions.

In Haskell
derive h
is called a higher order function for the same reason.

D is in curried form. If it would be uncurried, you would write D(f,x).


3 Blog Posts

There have been several blog posts on this recently. I think we should gather the information together and make a nice wiki article on it here. For now, here are links to articles on the topic.

4 Code

Retrieved from "http://www.haskell.org/haskellwiki/Functional_differentiation"

Category: Mathematics