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Sometimes I may come up with an equation in mind, so I want to search for the related material. It may be the case that I learn it before but forget the name, or, there is no name for the equation yet. In this case, I may be able to recall a reference book. Searching in Internet can be a fast way though.

However, there are cases that I get some idea and equations (maybe a modified one) myself. So I want to know whether there are any other people working on it before. Because of the vagueness, it is difficult to search it by keywords because I do not know the 'name' of this idea: it is either too board or no results.

I can try to search google scholar, arxiv and maybe the prola, but there is no support of equation pattern matching. For example, entering ∇⋅V in google give you no useful results (it is better if you input the 'divergence of potential').

Is there any good way to search papers in this case? It is even better that I can use the combination of equations and keywords.

Edit: Another reason is that Mathematician should have done some deep analysis on the related mathematical topics. Yet it is difficult to know their results because there is a gap between the terms used in physics and mathematics. It would be really useful if we can find and learn their results.

Qmechanic
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unsym
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2 Answers2

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You can perform $\LaTeX$ search - that is, write formula in LaTeX in an appropriate search engine:

However, as one can type the same expression in different ways and with different symbols, I never used it it practice. (Anyone did?)

Piotr Migdal
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There was a similar question at Mathoverflow. I think it contains some useful references and discussion so it's definitely worth checking out.

Usually I would post this as a comment under the question but probably nobody would notice it anymore. And seeing that the other answer is also quite short I hope this is fine.

Community
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Marek
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