This isn’t (just) a naked attempt to steal @Ken’s rep. I don’t recall what McCarthy’s original motivation for creating Lisp might have been. But it is certainly suitable for computer algebra, including differentiation and integration.<\/p>\n
The reason that I am posting, though, is that automatic differentiation<\/em> is used to mean something other than differentiating symbolic expressions. It’s used to mean writing a function which calculate the derivative of another function. For example, given a Fortran program which calculates The first of these is a nice exercise in symbolic computation, though it is so well trodden that it might not be a good choice for a term paper. The second is an active research front and OP would have to be careful not to bite off more than (s)he can chew . However, even a limited implementation would be interesting and challenging.<\/p>\n Originally posted 2013-11-09 23:33:49. <\/small><\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" This isn’t (just) a naked attempt to steal @Ken’s rep. I don’t recall what McCarthy’s original motivation for creating Lisp might have been. But it is certainly suitable for computer algebra, including differentiation and integration. The reason that I am posting, though, is that automatic differentiation is used to mean something other than differentiating symbolic […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1165","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/unknownerror.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1165","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/unknownerror.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/unknownerror.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/unknownerror.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/unknownerror.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1165"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/unknownerror.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1165\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/unknownerror.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1165"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/unknownerror.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1165"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/unknownerror.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1165"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}f(x)<\/code> an automatic differentiation tool would write a Fortran function which calculates f'(x)<\/code>. One technique, of course, is to try to transform the program into a symbolic expression, then use symbolic differentiation, then transform the resulting expression into a program again.<\/p>\n