The travelling wave: An intuition

The aim of this section is to understand the traveling wave solution.

We all know about our favorite function – ‘The sinusoid’.

becomes 0 whenever i.e

Now the form of the traveling sine wave is as follows:

When does the value for y become 0 ? Well, it is when

As you can see this value of is dependent on the value of time ,which means that the points where moves to the right as time progresses.

…

Here is a slowly moving forward sine wave for reference.

You can now try to convince yourself that a sine wave moving to the left is given by :

** The general form of a traveling wave is . For the sake of simplicity we have considered the case where but understand that you can apply the same argument to any value of as well.

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