A mathematical approximation in the physical sciences

Abstract

The business of making mathematical approximations in the physical sciences has a long and noble history. For example, in the earliest days of pyramid construction in ancient Egypt it was necessary to approximate lengths required in construction, especially when they involved irrational numbers. Similarly, surveyors in early Greece seeking to lay out profiles of right-angle triangles or circles on the ground invariably ended up making approximations regarding measurements of required lengths, as indeed is the case today. Practitioners have always faced the problem of having to decide when parameters in theory have been met satisfactorily in the practice of measurement. Further, before the advent of hand-held calculators, students in schools in the UK would have been very familiar with the approximation 22/7 for the transcendental number π, obtained perhaps by comparing (as this author did) the measured circumferences of many laboriously drawn circles of different sizes with their diameters. Despite the advent of sophisticated calculating devices and facilities, such as computers and spreadsheets, the practice of making approximations is still much in evidence in theoretical work in fields associated with physical phenomena. Such approximations often result in formulae that are easy to use and remember, and moreover can produce theoretical results that support directly, or otherwise, results from measurements. In this respect, the practical mathematician does not have to seek results to many decimal places when measurement facilities allow for accuracy to only a few. The purpose of this Article is to illustrate this point by discussing an example drawn from the realms of antenna theory, relating to the performance of a dipole antenna. It is not the purpose here to delve into the derivation of dipole theory, but to extract the relevant information and show how useful mathematical approximations can be employed to simplify a relationship between parameters of interest to an antenna engineer. To this end, it will first be necessary to introduce some antenna concepts that might be new to the reader.