stumbled upon it years ago but I’m terrible at math so kinda forgot about it for years, recently stumbled upon it again so out of pure curiosity, what is it? does it have real world use or is it something purely theoretical?
In: Mathematics
In not-entirely-eli5 terms, it’s a mathematical operation that converts a function that varies over time to another function that varies over… something else. That something else is called the “laplace domain” and it is beyond my ability to ELI5 what it actually is. Well tbh the entire thing is not very ELI5-able.
Anyway, Laplace transform is an extremely useful tool because it turns complicated and difficult integrations and differentiations into much, *much* simpler multiplications and divisions. That means doing math in the laplace domain is much easier. If you have one of the above-mentioned functions that vary over time, and you want to use that to do some complicated math, you can make things quite a bit simpler and faster by putting the function through a laplace transformation first. Afterwards you can compute the inverse of the transformation and get your result back as a function that varies over time. You get to the same end result, but you take a much faster route to get there. This all makes the laplace transformation a very commonly used tool in many engineering fields. Even computers can benefit quite a lot from the simplification that it provides.
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