# Forward ¶

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One of the methods to approximate the solution of a Cauchy problem is the forward Euler method (Euler explicite).

We approximate the solution with the sequence defined by:

$\left\lbrace \begin{array}{l} z_0 = y_0 \\ z_{k+1} = z_k + (t_{k+1} - t_k) \times f(t_k, z_k)\quad \forall k < N \end{array} \right .$

The expression of $z_{k+1}$ is based on Taylor's formula, using $y\prime = f(t, y)$ to approximate the first derivative value. Try to notice how similar they are!

The method is called forward because the expression of $z_{k+1}$ only depends on known values.

This method is the simplest, but has the default to easily have big errors.

## Example ¶

$\left\lbrace \begin{array}{l} y\prime = y \\ y(0) = 1 \end{array} \right .$

on $[0; 1]$ .

The solution is, of course, exponential, but let see how we could implement it:

#Constant
N <- 100
a <- 0
b <- 1
y0 <- 1

#How we pose the problem.
f <- function (t, y) { return (y) }
#We use a constant step.
h <- (b-a) / (N-1)
t <- seq(a, b, h)

#Initialization of the sequence.
z <- 1:N
z[1] <- y0

#Recurrence
for (k in 2:N)
{
z[k] <- z[k-1] + h * f(t, z[k-1])
}

#Our magnificent approximation of exp([0; 1]) .
plot(t, z)