An introduction to regular splines and their application for initial value problems of ordinary differential equations

This report describes an application of the general method of integrating initial value problems by means of regular splines for equations with movable singularities. By defining the families of functions that make up the regular splines such that they closely resemble the behaviour of the solutions of the differential equation, it is possible to trace the location of the singularities very precisely. To demonstrate this we treat Riccati differential equations. These are known to possess solutions with poles, usually of the first order. This type of differential equation or system arises in describing chemical or biological processes or more general control processes. To make the report self contained it starts with an introduction to regular splines and develops the algebraic tools for the manipulation of rational splines. After the description of the integration procedure, the asymptotic behaviour of the systematic error is investigated. An example exhibits the results obtained from the program given in Appendix A. Then Riccati equations are introduced and methods for the determination of the singularities are developed. These methods are tested numerically with several examples. The results are given in Appendix B

Polynomial cubic splines with tension properties

In this paper we present a new class of spline functions with tension properties. These splines are composed by polynomial cubic pieces and therefore are conformal to the standard, NURBS based CAD/CAM systems

A rational cubic spline with tension

A rational cubic spline curve is described which has tension control parameters for manipulating the shape of the curve. The spline is presented in both interpolatory and rational B-spline forms, and the behaviour of the resulting representations is analysed with respect to variation of the control parameters

Inconsistencies in the application of harmonic analysis to pulsating stars

Using ultra-precise data from space instrumentation we found that the underlying functions of stellar light curves from some AF pul- sating stars are non-analytic, and consequently their Fourier expansion is not guaranteed. This result demonstrates that periodograms do not provide a mathematically consistent estimator of the frequency content for this kind of variable stars. More importantly, this constitutes the first counterexample against the current paradigm which considers that any physical process is described by a contin- uous (band-limited) function that is infinitely differentiable.Comment: 9 pages, 8 figure

Computation and analysis

Direct summation of series involving higher transcendental functions, integrals of confluent hypergeometric functions, and computer methods for approximating continuous function