Becoming Functional

Learn the essential supply chain management concepts and processes within Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management to become a skilled functional consultant

New technologies allow us to handle increasingly large datasets, while monitoring devices are becoming ever more sophisticated. This high-tech progress produces statistical units sampled over finer and finer grids. As the measurement points become closer, the data can be considered as observations varying over a continuum. This intrinsic continuous data (called functional data) can be found in various fields of science, including biomechanics, chemometrics, econometrics, environmetrics, geophysics, medicine, etc.

Originally, functional analysis was that branch of mathematics capable of investigating in an abstract way a series of linear mathematical models from science. The study of these linear models—in fact, only first approximations of real models—proved insufficient, so the theory had to be extended to be able to describe the nonlinear phenomena themselves. In this way nonlinear functional analysis was born and continues to develop, becoming a vast and fascinating field of mathematics, with deep applications to increasingly complex problems in physics, biology, chemistry, and economics.