Components of Curl, Divergence

Contingency
Messages
41
Reaction score
0

Homework Statement


I'm trying to understand where the Cartesian components of the rotor and the divergence of a vector field derived.

I read that the divergence of a vector field is defined by:
\vec { \nabla } \cdot \vec { F } =\lim _{ V\rightarrow \left\{ P \right\} }{ \frac { 1 }{ \left| V \right| } \iint _{ \partial V }^{ }{ \vec { F } \cdot \vec { dA } } }

Also, that components of the rotor are defined by:
\vec { \nabla } \times \vec { F } \cdot \hat { u } =\lim _{ A(\Gamma )\rightarrow 0 }{ \frac { 1 }{ \left| A(\Gamma ) \right| } \int _{ \Gamma }^{ }{ \vec { F } \cdot \vec { dr } } }

I'm trying to understand where the standard "sum of partial derivatives", and the mnemonic determinant with a row of unit vectors come from. I don't see a correlation between the definitions and these simple representations. How are they derived from the definition?

Homework Equations


\vec { \nabla } \times \vec { F } \cdot \hat { u } =\lim _{ A(\Gamma )\rightarrow 0 }{ \frac { 1 }{ \left| A(\Gamma ) \right| } \int _{ \Gamma }^{ }{ \vec { F } \cdot \vec { dr } } }

\vec { \nabla } \cdot \vec { F } =\lim _{ V\rightarrow \left\{ P \right\} }{ \frac { 1 }{ \left| V \right| } \iint _{ \partial V }^{ }{ \vec { F } \cdot \vec { dA } } }

The Attempt at a Solution


No clue
 
Physics news on Phys.org
You can choose a cube as volume (if the general limit exists, it is the same for a special type of volume), and get the coordinate representation in the limit.
In the same way, you can use a square as path.
 
This is obviously not a precalculus question, so I am moving it to the appropriate section.
 
My bad, didn't double check. Sorry
 
mfb said:
You can choose a cube as volume (if the general limit exists, it is the same for a special type of volume), and get the coordinate representation in the limit.
In the same way, you can use a square as path.

Can you please be a bit more specific?
I divided my field into orthogonal component functions, and I'm trying to look at the circulation of the field over a square with sides parallel to the axis. In order to get my result i'd have to approximate the field as constant over each side.. Why can I do that?
 
There are two things I don't understand about this problem. First, when finding the nth root of a number, there should in theory be n solutions. However, the formula produces n+1 roots. Here is how. The first root is simply ##\left(r\right)^{\left(\frac{1}{n}\right)}##. Then you multiply this first root by n additional expressions given by the formula, as you go through k=0,1,...n-1. So you end up with n+1 roots, which cannot be correct. Let me illustrate what I mean. For this...
Back
Top