In this paper we discuss a new method which can be used to obtain arbitrarily accurate analytical expressions for the deflection angle of light propagating in a given metric. Our method works by mapping the integral into a rapidly convergent series and provides extremely accurate approximations already to first order. We have derived a general first order formula for a generic spherically symmetric static metric tensor and we have tested it in four different cases.

We develop powerful numerical and analytical techniques for the solution of the Helmholtz equation on general domains. We prove two theorems: the first theorem provides an exact formula for the ground state of an arbirtrary membrane, while the second theorem generalizes this result to any excited state of the membrane. We also develop a systematic perturbative scheme which can be used to study the small deformations of a membrane of circular or square shapes. We discuss several applications, obtaining numerical and analytical results.

In this paper we study a new family of sinc-like functions, defined on an interval of finite width. These functions, which we call "little sinc", are orthogonal and share many of the properties of the sinc functions. We show that the little sinc functions supplemented with a variational approach enable one to obtain accurate results for a variety of problems. We apply them to the interpolation of functions on finite domain and to the solution of the Schrödinger equation, and compare the performance of present approach with others.

We apply the Linear Delta Expansion (LDE) to the Lindstedt-Poincaré ("distorted time") method to find improved approximate solutions to nonlinear problems. We find that our method works very well for a wide range of parameters in the case of the anharmonic oscillator (Duffing equation) and of the non-linear pendulum. The approximate solutions found with this method are better behaved and converge more rapidly to the exact ones than in the simple Lindstedt-Poincaré method. * Electronic address: paolo@ucol.mx † Electronic address: fefo@cgic.ucol.mx

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