cnoidal

See also: cnoïdal

English

Etymology

Coined by Korteweg and de Vries in their paper in Philosophical Magazine (1895, series 5, vol. 39, pp. 422-443) to describe a class of solutions to the KdV equation which involve a Jacobi elliptic function. The Jacobi elliptic function involved is commonly written as $\mathrm {cn} (x|m)$ , and the term cnoidal was designed to be analogous to sinusoidal, the word describing waves which involve the sine function.