Mathematics

My PhD was on the topic of delay differential equations (DDEs) and, at the time, I wrote lots of utilities to do things like calculate the stability of linearised equations. All that code has been lost to the mists of time but I still have call for it every now and again (e.g., for real-time dynamic substructuring where I need to model the delays in the control loop). Here is some code in Julia that calculates the stability of a DDE in the form ...

Every now and again I’m asked how to compute the periodic orbits of ODEs using a boundary value solver. Each time, I go looking for old code that does this and, each time, I can’t find it and end up rewriting the collocation code from scratch. This time I thought I’d put my code here so that I have a better chance of finding it again in the future! The basic idea is to use a Fourier differentiation matrix to approximate the derivatives along the orbit and use a nonlinear solver to ensure that those derivatives match the vector field. If you want to know more about these types of spectral methods, take a look at the excellent (and short!) introduction by Trefethen in “Spectral Methods in MATLAB”, SIAM 2000. If you want more detail then the magnum opus by Boyd “Chebyshev and Fourier Spectral Methods”, Dover 2001 (freely available on his personal website) is also very good. ...