The Heat Equation

The Heat Equation is rather simple as scientific equations go, but in many ways it is the most marvelous of them all, considering all the uses it's been put to, not only in the field of Heat Transfer in Thermodynamics.

In Mathematics, for example, an abstract form of heat equation on manifolds provides a major approach to the Atiyah–Singer index theorem, and has led to much further work on heat equations in Riemannian geometry,  and thus topology: it was adapted by Richard Hamilton when he defined the Ricci flow that was later used by Grigori Perelman to solve the topological Poincaré conjecture.

From Wikipedia:

The heat equation is an important partial differential equation which describes the distribution of heat (or variation in temperature) in a given region over time. For a function u(x,y,z,t) of three spatial variables (x,y,z) and the time variable t, the heat equation is

also written

or sometimes

where α is a positive constant and or denotes the Laplace operator. For the mathematical treatment it is sufficient to consider the case α = 1. For the case of variation of temperature u(x,y,z,t) is the temperature and α is the thermal diffusivity

The heat equation is of fundamental importance in diverse scientific fields. In mathematics, it is the prototypical parabolic partial differential equation. In probability theory, the heat equation is connected with the study of Brownian motion via the Fokker–Planck equation. In financial mathematics it is used to solve the Black–Scholes partial differential equation. The diffusion equation, a more general version of the heat equation, arises in connection with the study of chemical diffusion and other related processes.

General description

Suppose one has a function u which describes the temperature at a given location (x, y, z). This function will change over time as heat spreads throughout space. The heat equation is used to determine the change in the function u over time. The image to the right is animated and describes the way heat changes in time along a metal bar. One of the interesting properties of the heat equation is the maximum principle which says that the maximum value of u is either earlier in time than the region of concern or on the edge of the region of concern. This is essentially saying that temperature comes either from some source or from earlier in time because heat permeates but is not created from nothingness. This is a property of parabolic partial differential equations and is not difficult to prove mathematically.

Another interesting property is that even if u has a discontinuity at an initial time t = t₀, the temperature becomes smooth as soon as t > t₀. For example, if a bar of metal has temperature 0 and another has temperature 100 and they are stuck together end to end, then very quickly the temperature at the point of connection is 50 and the graph of the temperature is smoothly running from 0 to 100.

The heat equation is used in probability and describes random walks. It is also applied in financial mathematics for this reason.

For more on The Heat equation click here for the Wikipedia entry and further exploration.

The heat equation predicts that if a hot body is placed in a box of cold water, the temperature of the body will decrease, and eventually (after infinite time, and subject to no external heat sources) the temperature in the box will equalize.