View source for MathMod:From falling apples to moving planets

As a pedagogical example, let us consider the famous story of Sir Isaac Newton being inspired to formulate his theory of gravitation by watching the fall of an apple from a tree in the year 1666. We have implemented this within the MathModDB knowledge graph by including a ''Research Field'' named &quot;Pomology&quot; (science of fruits) containing &quot;Gravitational Effects on Fruit&quot; as a specific ''Research Problem''. Currently, there is a choice of two ''Mathematical Model''s addressing this problem, i. e., &quot;Free Fall Models&quot; without and with the effect of air drag, both of them assuming constant gravitation. The former one, actually dating back to Newton, contains the simple &quot;Free Fall Equation&quot;, <math display="inline">v=-gt</math>, as a ''Mathematical Formulation''. That equation contains the free fall velocity <math display="inline">v</math>, the gravitational acceleration <math display="inline">g</math>, and the time <math display="inline">t</math>. Obviously, the first and second of these ''Quantities'' are assigned to the ''QuantityKinds'' velocity and acceleration, respectively. Within the context of these &quot;Free Fall Models&quot;, several different ''Computational Tasks'' can be formulated, e.g., how long does it take for an apple to reach the ground, or with which velocity will it hit the ground. While the above equation (without air drag) is so simple that it can be solved analytically, in more realistic free fall models the underlying equations have to be solved analytically which falls into the realm of the MathAlgoDB knowledge graph containing suitable numerical solvers for ordinary differential equations such as the Runge Kutta family of algorithms. Finally, we mention that also more complex models involving gravitational effects have been implemented in MathModDB, such as the dynamics of planets in our solar system.