## Friday, May 22, 2009

### Maxima Functions to Generate Finite Difference Expressions

I've written a couple posts demonstrating the use of Maxima to calculate finite difference expressions of various varieties (complex step derivatives, compact differences, plain old differences). The batch files associated with those aren't very user friendly, if you want to calculate different expressions you have to go in and edit them in several places. So I decided to write a couple functions that would take two arguments and return the finite difference expression you asked for.

Maxima file for explicit finite difference expressions.

Maxima file for implicit or compact finite difference expressions.

Usage is just:

foo : explicit_fde([-1,0,1],1);

which would put a central difference expression for the first derivative into foo. The first argument is a list representing the stencil to use, the second argument is the derivative you want to estimate.

The implicit expressions are similar:

The extra argument is so that you don't get the trivial solution back (see this post for details). Also, the return value for the implicit expression is the augmented coefficient matrix for the first derivative. That means the last column is the explicit side of the expression (terms involving the function value), and the first n columns are the coefficients for the first derivative at the stencil points.