The stokes package: exterior calculus in R

Overview

The stokes package provides functionality for working with the exterior calculus. It includes cross products and wedge products and a variety of use-cases. The canonical reference would be Spivak (see references). A detailed vignette is provided in the package.

The package deals with -tensors and -forms. A -tensor is a multilinear map , where is considered as a vector space. Given two -tensors the package can calculate their outer product using natural R idiom (see below and the vignette for details).

A -form is an alternating -tensor, that is a -tensor with the property that linear dependence of implies that . Given -forms , the package provides R idiom for calculating their wedge product .

Installation

You can install the released version of stokes from CRAN with:

# install.packages("stokes")  # uncomment this to install the package
library("stokes")
set.seed(0)

The stokes package in use

The package has two main classes of objects, kform and ktensor. We may define a -tensor as follows

KT <- as.ktensor(cbind(1:4,3:5),1:4)
#> Warning in cbind(1:4, 3:5): number of rows of result is not a multiple of
#> vector length (arg 2)
KT
#>          val
#>  1 3  =    1
#>  2 4  =    2
#>  3 5  =    3
#>  4 3  =    4

We can coerce KT to a function and then evaluate it:

KT <- as.ktensor(cbind(1:4,2:5),1:4)
f <- as.function(KT)
E <- matrix(rnorm(10),5,2)
f(E)
#> [1] 11.23556

Cross products are implemented:

KT %X% KT
#>              val
#>  3 4 3 4  =    9
#>  2 3 1 2  =    2
#>  2 3 2 3  =    4
#>  3 4 1 2  =    3
#>  4 5 1 2  =    4
#>  1 2 1 2  =    1
#>  1 2 2 3  =    2
#>  2 3 3 4  =    6
#>  3 4 2 3  =    6
#>  4 5 4 5  =   16
#>  4 5 2 3  =    8
#>  1 2 3 4  =    3
#>  4 5 3 4  =   12
#>  1 2 4 5  =    4
#>  2 3 4 5  =    8
#>  3 4 4 5  =   12

Alternating forms

An alternating form (or -form) is an antisymmetric -tensor; the package can convert a general -tensor to alternating form using the Alt() function:

Alt(KT)
#>           val
#>  1 2  =   0.5
#>  2 1  =  -0.5
#>  4 3  =  -1.5
#>  2 3  =   1.0
#>  3 2  =  -1.0
#>  5 4  =  -2.0
#>  3 4  =   1.5
#>  4 5  =   2.0

However, the package provides a bespoke and efficient representation for -forms as objects with class kform. Such objects may be created using the as.kform() function:

M <- matrix(c(4,2,3,1,2,4),2,3,byrow=TRUE)
M
#>      [,1] [,2] [,3]
#> [1,]    4    2    3
#> [2,]    1    2    4
KF <- as.kform(M,c(1,5))
KF
#>            val
#>  2 3 4  =    1
#>  1 2 4  =    5

We may coerce KF to functional form:

f <- as.function(KF)
E <- matrix(rnorm(12),4,3)
f(E)
#> [1] -5.979544

The wedge product

The wedge product of two -forms is implemented as %^% or wedge():

KF2 <- kform_general(6:9,2,1:6)
KF2
#>          val
#>  6 7  =    1
#>  6 8  =    2
#>  7 9  =    5
#>  7 8  =    3
#>  6 9  =    4
#>  8 9  =    6
KF %^% KF2
#>                val
#>  2 3 4 6 7  =    1
#>  1 2 4 6 8  =   10
#>  1 2 4 6 9  =   20
#>  2 3 4 7 9  =    5
#>  1 2 4 7 9  =   25
#>  2 3 4 6 8  =    2
#>  1 2 4 6 7  =    5
#>  2 3 4 8 9  =    6
#>  2 3 4 6 9  =    4
#>  2 3 4 7 8  =    3
#>  1 2 4 7 8  =   15
#>  1 2 4 8 9  =   30

The package can accommodate a number of results from the exterior calculus such as elementary forms:

dx <- as.kform(1)
dy <- as.kform(2)
dz <- as.kform(3)
dx %^% dy %^% dz  # element of volume 
#>            val
#>  1 2 3  =    1

A number of useful functions from the exterior calculus are provided, such as the gradient of a scalar function:

grad(1:6)
#>        val
#>  1  =    1
#>  2  =    2
#>  3  =    3
#>  4  =    4
#>  5  =    5
#>  6  =    6

The package takes the leg-work out of the exterior calculus:

grad(1:4) %^% grad(1:6)
#>          val
#>  2 5  =   10
#>  3 5  =   15
#>  3 6  =   18
#>  1 5  =    5
#>  2 6  =   12
#>  4 5  =   20
#>  1 6  =    6
#>  4 6  =   24

References

The most concise reference is

• Spivak 1971. Calculus on manifolds, Addison-Wesley.

But an accessible book would be

• Hubbard and Hubbard 2015. Vector calculus, linear algebra, and differential forms: a unified approach. Matrix Editions

Further information

For more detail, see the package vignette

vignette("stokes")