Jacobi's elliptic functions

In mathematics, the Jacobi elliptic functions are a set of basic elliptic functions, and auxiliary theta functions, that are of historical importance. Many of their features show up in important structures and have direct relevance to some applications (e.g. the equation of a pendulum—also see pendulum (mathematics)). They also have useful analogies to the functions of trigonometry, as indicated by the matching notation sn for sin. The Jacobi elliptic functions are used more often in practical problems than the Weierstrass elliptic functions as they do not require notions of complex analysis to be defined and/or understood. They were introduced by Carl Gustav Jakob Jacobi (1829).

Jacobian elliptic functions are doubly periodic meromorphic functions on the complex plane. Since they are doubly periodic, they factor through a torus – in effect, their domain can be taken to be a torus, just as cosine and sine are in effect defined on a circle. Instead of having only one circle, we now have the product of two circles, one real and the other imaginary. The complex plane can be replaced by a complex torus. The circumference of the first circle is 4K and the second 4K′, where K and K′ are the quarter periods. Each function has two zeroes and two poles at opposite positions on the torus. Among the points 0, K, K + iK′, iK′ there is one zero and one pole. So an arrow can be drawn from a zero to a pole.

So there are twelve Jacobian elliptic functions. Each of the twelve corresponds to an arrow drawn from one corner of a rectangle to another. The corners of the rectangle are labeled, by convention, s, c, d and n. s is at the origin, c is at the point K on the real axis/loop, d is at the point K + iK′ and n is at point iK′ on the imaginary axis/loop. The twelve Jacobian elliptic functions are then pq, where each of p and q is a different one of the letters s, c, d, n.

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