Potential function
Encyclopedia
The term potential function may refer to:
- A mathematical functionFunction (mathematics)In mathematics, a function associates one quantity, the argument of the function, also known as the input, with another quantity, the value of the function, also known as the output. A function assigns exactly one output to each input. The argument and the value may be real numbers, but they can...
whose values are a physical potentialPotential*In linguistics, the potential mood*The mathematical study of potentials is known as potential theory; it is the study of harmonic functions on manifolds...
. - The class of functions known as harmonic functionHarmonic functionIn mathematics, mathematical physics and the theory of stochastic processes, a harmonic function is a twice continuously differentiable function f : U → R which satisfies Laplace's equation, i.e....
s, which are the topic of study in potential theoryPotential theoryIn mathematics and mathematical physics, potential theory may be defined as the study of harmonic functions.- Definition and comments :The term "potential theory" was coined in 19th-century physics, when it was realized that the fundamental forces of nature could be modeled using potentials which...
. - The potential function of a potential gamePotential gameA game in game theory is considered a potential game if the incentive of all players to change their strategy can be expressed in one global function, the potential function. The concept was proposed by Dov Monderer and Lloyd Shapley. Games can be either ordinal or cardinal potential games...
. - A function used in the potential methodPotential methodIn computational complexity theory, the potential method is a method used to analyze the amortized time and space complexity of a data structure, a measure of its performance over sequences of operations that smooths out the cost of infrequent but expensive operations.-Definition of amortized...
of amortized analysis to describe an investment of resources by past operations that can be used by future operations.