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Feature
REALScience
Using REALbasic to solve scientific problems
Issue: 3.4 (March/April 2005)
Author: JC Cruz
Author Bio: JC is a freelance engineering consultant currently residing in British Columbia. He works on OS X applications and origami models while dreaming of retiring to the Atlantic provinces.
Article Description: No description available.
Article Length (in bytes): 19,817
Starting Page Number: 19
RBD Number: 3411
Resource File(s):
3411.sit Updated: Tuesday, March 15, 2005 at 7:50 PM
Related Web Link(s):
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Differential_equation
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Runge-Kutta_methods
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Numerical_ordinary_differential_equations
http://home.earthlink.net/~delaneyrm/MPCalcPlugin.html
http://home.earthlink.net/~delaneyrm/PrecisionPlugin.html
Known Limitations: None
Excerpt of article text...
REALScience is a series of occasional articles focused on the use of REALbasic to solve a number of science problems. The goal of REALScience is to introduce readers to mathematical algorithms and computer science concepts that are used by most scientific software. With some modifications, these same algorithms and concepts can also be used in non-scientific application such as games, spreadsheets, and so on.
When applicable, the basic mathematics behind each algorithm will be briefly described but not elaborated. Readers are assumed to have a working knowledge of college algebra, basic calculus, and of course, REALbasic.
Coffee and the Euler Method
The Problem with Coffee
As any coffee drinker would notice, a cup of hot java eventually gets "cold." In more scientific terms, the cup of coffee has attained thermal equilibrium with the surrounding temperature. But how long does it take for coffee to cool down?
This is a classic example of Newton's Law of Cooling which states that the rate of temperature change of an object is proportional to the temperature difference between the object and its surroundings. In other words, as our cup of coffee nears room temperature, its change in temperature slows down. If we are to plot our coffee temperature with respect to time, the resulting plot will not be a straight line.
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Article copyrighted by REALbasic Developer magazine. All rights reserved.
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