How can you best explain divergence and curl?

How can you best explain the divergence and curl? What is their significance? What are
their real world applications and examples?

6 Answers

Mark Eichenlaub, PhD student in Physics

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tl;dr

You and three friends float down a river, each marking a corner of a square. If your square is
getting bigger, the river has positive divergence. If it's shrinking, negative divergence.

Next, you and your friends are rigidly connected so your square can't change shape. If the
square starts rotating like a frisbee as it goes along, the river has curl. Positive curl is
counterclockwise rotation. Negative curl is clockwise.

This answer assumes a good knowledge of calculus, including partial derivatives, vectors,
and the way we talk about these things in an introductory calculus-based physics course. I'll
also assume you know the kinematics of rotations and how to approximate multi-variable
functions about an arbitrary point with the first-order terms of its Taylor series.

Tubing Down a River

Most students learn the divergence and curl because they're important in Maxwell's
equations of electrodynamics. These concepts apply to any vector field, though. Here, let's
just visualize you and some friends floating down a river on inner tubes. The vector field is
the field giving the velocity of the river's flow. The divergence and curl describe what
happens to you and your friends as you float down the river together.

Suppose you are tubing down a river with three friends. You position yourselves into a
square formation. Assuming the river flows perfectly-evenly, you'll all float along together
and stay in that perfect square.
However, if the river moves faster in some places than others, some of you might get ahead
or fall behind. Maybe the flow picks up sideways components and you drift apart. Your
square gets messed up.

The black arrows show some sort of messy, complicated flow. The red square that is your
initial positions distorts into the pointed shape.

Mathematically, we will treat a person in an inner tube as a point moving in two

dimensions. The flow of the river is a vector field - a vector for the velocity of the flow at
each point. We imagine that people flow perfectly down the river; their velocity always
matches the vector field exactly. (In real life, this is not exactly how it happens; the water
can move underneath you.) Also, the people themselves are just test particles - bits of dust
floating on the surface that don't affect the river's flow in any way. Because we always know
their velocity, we can integrate their motion forward and find their trajectories.
Finally, to avoid complications, imagine that the vector field describing the river's flow is
constant in time. Different parts can flow at different speeds (so you could speed up or slow
down as you tube along), but the water passing by some particular fixed point always has
the same speed and direction.

We'll denote the flow's velocity vector as a function of position as

and are real-valued functions of two variables. and are unit vectors in the x and y

directions. To save space, I'll sometimes just write instead of , so just keep in mind
that it's a function of position.

Area and Divergence

Let's take the shape made by you and your three friends and call that your span. Originally,
your span is a square, but as you go along it may distort. Divergence describes how fast the
area of your span is changing.

For example, imagine that the river gets faster and faster the further you go downstream.
Then your friends in front of you will keep getting further and further ahead, and your span
stretches out. This is an example of a positive divergence. This is illustrated below. The
shape of the span is accurately calculated for this particular vector field.

On the other hand, if places further up move more slowly so you scrunch in closer to your
friends, that's negative divergence; the area of your span goes down.

If you are all floating apart from each other, that's positive divergence.
source: The idea of the divergence of a vector field

In this vector field, your square would get bigger in all directions at once.

The opposite, where all the arrows come pointing in, would be negative divergence.

If the river is simultaneously getting faster and narrower, your square gets longer and
skinnier. If it does it just right, the "getting longer" part could cancel the "getting skinnier"
part so that the area stays the same. This would be zero divergence. Here's an example I
constructed:
Preliminary Definition of Divergence

We would like to start calculating the divergence. It seems like we should get something like
"such-and-such many square meters per second" for our answer, because the divergence has
to do with the rate that an area is changing.

This has a problem, though, because the number will be different if we start with a tiny span
than if we start with a large span. We want the divergence to refer to a property of the
mathematical vector field. It captures the "spreading apart" nature of the vectors
themselves. Its value shouldn't depend on some particular span size we choose.

The solution is to use the percentage area gained per second, which is the same for large and
small spans. This could also be called the fractional rate of change. The fractional rate of
change of the area is the rate of change of the area in absolute terms divided by the area
itself. This our definition of the divergence, which we will denote by

The units of the area cancel out, and we're left with units of inverse seconds, as is normal for
rates.
If the divergence is , then the span is adding area at a rate of two times its own area
once per second. So it would take about 0.005 seconds to increase its area by 1%.

(Side note: if you understand calculus well, you can see that this means that after one
second, the span would be times as large as it originally was.)

We can now calculate a divergence. Let's imagine the river's flow is described by

This is saying that the flow is all in the x-direction and that it gets faster and faster as you go
further along in that direction. If you went out 100 meters, the flow rate would be

You're out, going . Let's say you have a span that's a square on a side. Your

two friends in front of you are ahead, so they're going . That means they're

pulling away from you at . That means the square is growing at a rate of .

If you didn't follow where all the numbers came from in the previous paragraph, you should
go back and work them out. Putting it together, the divergence is

You can repeat this calculation putting yourself at any position and using any size span (and
rotating it if you want). You'll get the same answer.

If you want to test yourself, suppose the flow is given by

Give yourself a starting span somewhere with a certain size. Figure out the rate that its area
is changing, and find the divergence. You should find that the divergence is
This result actually makes intuitive sense. and are constants added to the velocity. They
just move the entire square along without changing its shape, so they don't cause any
divergence. We're only concerned with the relative motion between the corners. Therefore,
we can simply take the bottom-left corner and consider it to be fixed.

represents how fast the right hand side of the box is moving out. This adds to the box's
area, and so is part of the divergence.

represents how fast the top part moves to the right.

This causes your square to shear, turning it into a parallelogram, like this:

source: Shear stress

It still has the same base and height, so the area doesn't change. That's why doesn't come
into the formula.

The same reasoning applies to (the right hand side sliding up and down, more shear)

and (moving the top upward, adding to the area, and affecting the divergence).

Calculus

For the simple example I gave, the divergence is the same no matter where you put your
span. However, in a complicated flow, the flow will be doing different things at different
places. It may be coming together (negative divergence) in some places and moving apart
(positive divergence) in others. Evidently, the divergence needs to be a function of and .

This presents a problem, because now the size of the span is going to make a difference. If
the divergence is different from spot to spot, then it's different at different spots inside your
span, but we're just trying to get a single correct answer.

This is very similar to the problem of finding the slope of a line in calculus. The slope of the
line changes from point to point, so if you calculate between two points, you keep
getting different answers depending on how far apart the points are. Slope shouldn't depend
on how far apart the points you choose are, and divergence shouldn't depend on how large
an original span you choose.

The solution to both problems is the same - we take a limit. In calculus, you take the limit as
the distance between your two points on the function goes to zero. In vector calculus, we
take the limit as the size of our starting span goes to zero.

In single-variable calculus you'll get the right answer for the slope using a finite-size interval
as long as you're measuring the slope of a straight line. That's essentially why the examples I
gave in the previous section work; the vector field I gave is the equivalent of a straight line.

Expression for the Divergence

When you zoom in close to a function, it looks locally like a straight line. Likewise, when you
zoom in close to a vector field, it looks locally like our equivalent to a straight line, for which
we already calculated the divergence.

To be specific, a function of one variable looks locally like

remember that our vector field is

We can expand the functions and the same way we expand single-variable functions,
so long as we use two partial derivatives.
and likewise for . Plugging these zoomed-in functions for and into gives

This is the same as our earlier vector field, with partial derivatives standing in for ,

and the initial value standing in for and , so by analogy we can say that the
divergence is

This is the divergence in two dimensions. Remember that it's a function of and .

A good test of whether you understand the divergence is to find its formula in polar
coordinates when the vector field is

You can do this in exactly the same way - draw a span, find how fast its area changes, and
divide by the area. The square is a little awkward here; use a span that looks like this:
source: Math 251 diary, fall 2010

The answer is

Continuity Equation

Suppose that the flow of water in the river is two dimensional, meaning no water moves
upwards or downwards. If there were positive divergence, that would mean the water was
taking up more and more space. But that in turn means that it would be thinning out,
getting less dense. In turn, if the were negative divergence, it would mean all the water in
some area was getting smashed together to become more dense.

For water, this is essentially impossible. The pressure it takes to compress water appreciably
is too high to reach in a river. You similarly can't thin it out; the water would just collapse.
This means that for flowing water the divergence is zero!

More generally, if the water is diverging at 1% per second, that means the same mass is
getting spread over 1% more volume, so the density is going down by 1% per second. This
relationship between the divergence and density is called the continuity equation. If the
density is , then
This equation works because mass is conserved. You'll see a similar equation for any
conservation law. For example, starting from Maxwell's equations, you can derive a
continuity equation like this for electric charge to show that charge is conserved. Starting
from Schrodinger's equation in quantum mechanics you can derive a continuity equation to
show that probability is conserved - the total probability to find a particle anywhere always
adds up to 100%.

Three Dimensions

In three dimensions, everything works the same way. You can think of eight dust particles
forming a cube that drifts through the air in your room. The fractional rate of change of the
volume of the cube is the divergence in three dimensions. It is

Eulerian vs Lagrangian Pictures

What I've described above might be called the "Lagrangian picture" of the divergence. We
imagine following along as you float down the river and talk about what happens to you.

For one reason or another, it is more popular to describe the divergence in the "Eulerian
picture", in which we imagine staying fixed in one spot and looking at properties of the flow
right there. Ultimately, there is no difference between the two, but you might hear people
describe the divergence in a way that sounds superficially different. It's actually the same.
You can learn that picture if you want, or stick with this one.

Curl

We now imagine a device made of rods and floaters like this one floating down the river:
It is basically the same thing as before, except rigid. You and your three friends have been
replaced by floaters at the end of the rods, and there's a central hub.

If the device spins, the flow has curl. For example, in this flow, the top part of the device is
in faster water and so gets ahead. The bottom part lags behind, and all together this causes
spin.
If the flow is perfectly uniform, the device won't spin and there's no curl.

In detail, the way we imagine this device working is that for the top/bottom floaters, what
matters is the horizontal component of the flow velocity. The vertical component of flow
velocity can only push or pull against the vertical rods, and so has no effect. For the
left/right floaters, what matters is the vertical components of the flow rate (zero in the
above picture).

Let's say the rods have length . The point is at the center of the device. The velocity
in the x-direction at the top floater is

On the other hand, if the device is moving along as a whole at and simultaneously

rotating at angular rate , the velocity of the top point would be

So it looks like the thing wants to rotate at a rate

We get the same answer if we look at the bottom floater.

If we look at the floater on the right and do the same analysis, it wants the device to rotate at

(You should draw this out to picture it.)

The device can only have one rotation speed, which we will say is the average of the speed
the top/bottom floaters want to go and speed the left/right floaters want to go. The curl is
then defined to be

It's twice the rotation rate. There's no special reason to make it twice as fast. It just works
out better that way when you think of some other possible ways to define the curl. Those
other ways are equivalent; you can read about them anywhere. This is just the picture I
have.

Three Dimensions

What we found above is the z-component of the curl. That's because the thing is spinning
around the z-axis. (The z-axis comes up out of your monitor.)

Imagine putting a toy jack-shaped device with six rods and floaters in the water, one in each
direction in 3D. It would spin just the same, but the two extra floaters would contribute
some extra torque. The device picks up some spin around the x-axis and y-axis in addition
to the familiar z-axis spin.

Adding up the spins around each axis (which you can do because angular velocities are
vectors) you find that the entire jack is spinning around some particular axis in 3D. This axis
is the direction of the curl in three dimensions. So the direction of the curl is just the
direction of the axis around which the device spins. The magnitude of the curl is still how
fast it spins.
 Further Reading
Div, Grad, Curl, and All That, Schey (An Informal Text on Vector Calculus (Fourth Edition):
H. M. Schey: 9780393925166: Amazon.com: Books)

If you have some time to answer a few questions about the effectiveness of this answer,
please check out Dan and I Diverge by Mark Eichenlaub on Painting the Cathedral

Updated 23 Apr, 2014 • View Upvotes

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