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Equation 13 · Part 8 · Einstein's Random Walk and the Mathematics of Genetic Drift

fraction

∂p(x,t)∂t=−∂∂x[μ(x,t) p(x,t)]+∂2∂x2[D(x,t) p(x,t)],\frac{\partial p(x,t)}{\partial t} = -\frac{\partial}{\partial x}\big[\mu(x,t)\,p(x,t)\big] + \frac{\partial^{2}}{\partial x^{2}}\big[D(x,t)\,p(x,t)\big],
fraction

What this part means

Divide the expression above the line by the one below it.

Its job in the formula

The expression above the fraction bar is divided by the complete expression below it. The denominator must not be zero.

The passage around this formula

Einstein’s equation described one physical system: particles buffeted by a fluid held at a fixed temperature, governed by a single constant D . Within a decade, physicists working on an unrelated problem — how the energy of a rotating electric dipole settles under both random radiative kicks and a systematic damping force in a radiation field — found they needed the same mathematical object with one addition: a drift term standing alongside the diffusion term. Adriaan Fokker wrote down that generalization in 1914, and Max Planck rederived and extended it in 1917; the combined equation has carried both names since [ 3 ] . In one dimension it reads ∂p(x,t)∂t=−∂∂x[μ(x,t) p(x,t)]+∂2∂x2[D(x,t) p(x,t)]\frac{\partial p(x,t)}{\partial t} = -\frac{\partial}{\partial x}\big[\mu(x,t)\,p(x,t)\big] + \frac{\partial^{2}}{\partial x^{2}}\big[D(x,t)\,p(x,t)\big]. where the first…

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Learn the underlying idea

A fraction a/b means a divided by b. The top number is the numerator; the bottom number is the denominator, and it cannot be zero.

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Sources cited in the surrounding passage

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