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In mathematics, the operation of substitution consists in replacing all the occurrences of a free variable appearing in an expression or a formula by a number or another expression. In other words, an expression involving free variables may be considered as defining a function, and substituting values to the variables in the expression is equivalent to applying the function defined by the expression to these values. A change of variables is commonly a particular type of substitution, where the substituted values are expressions that depend on other variables. This is a standard technique used to reduce a difficult problem to a simpler one. A change of coordinates is a common type of change of variables. However, if the expression in which the variables are changed involves derivatives or integrals, the change of variable does not reduce to a substitution. A very simple example of a useful variable change can be seen in the problem of finding the roots of the sixth order polynomial: : Sixth order polynomial equations are generally impossible to solve in terms of radicals (see Abel–Ruffini theorem). This particular equation, however, may be written : (this is a simple case of a polynomial decomposition). Thus the equation may be simplified by defining a new variable ''x''3 = ''u''. Substituting ''x'' by into the polynomial gives : which is just a quadratic equation with solutions: : The solutions in terms of the original variable are obtained by substituting ''x''3 back in for ''u'': : Then, assuming that ''x'' is real, : ==Simple example== Consider the system of equations : : where and are positive integers with . (Source: 1991 AIME) Solving this normally is not terrible, but it may get a little tedious. However, we can rewrite the second equation as . Making the substitution reduces the system to Solving this gives or Back-substituting the first ordered pair gives us , which easily gives the solution Back-substituting the second ordered pair gives us , which gives no solutions. Hence the solution that solves the system is . 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア(Wikipedia)』 ■ウィキペディアで「Change of variables」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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