Open Physics (Oct 2020)

Some misinterpretations and lack of understanding in differential operators with no singular kernels

  • Atangana Abdon,
  • Goufo Emile Franc Doungmo

DOI
https://doi.org/10.1515/phys-2020-0158
Journal volume & issue
Vol. 18, no. 1
pp. 594 – 612

Abstract

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Humans are part of nature, and as nature existed before mankind, mathematics was created by humans with the main aim to analyze, understand and predict behaviors observed in nature. However, besides this aspect, mathematicians have introduced some laws helping them to obtain some theoretical results that may not have physical meaning or even a representation in nature. This is also the case in the field of fractional calculus in which the main aim was to capture more complex processes observed in nature. Some laws were imposed and some operators were misused, such as, for example, the Riemann–Liouville and Caputo derivatives that are power-law-based derivatives and have been used to model problems with no power law process. To solve this problem, new differential operators depicting different processes were introduced. This article aims to clarify some misunderstandings about the use of fractional differential and integral operators with non-singular kernels. Additionally, we suggest some numerical discretizations for the new differential operators to be used when dealing with initial value problems. Applications of some nature processes are provided.

Keywords