Well then it seems to me that you'll need to get a firm grasp on the Laplacian
Operator "del" or "nabla".
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laplacian

Since it is used frequently in many fields of study, including "blob" and "edge
detection", you may wish to ask the folks who program the POV-Ray render engine,
look at the source code, talk to the brainiacs at http://math.stackexchange.com

http://math.stackexchange.com/questions/5076/what-does-upside-down-triangle-symbol-mean-in-this-problem

Check out Paul Nylander's page  www.bugman123.com

and basically play around with "systematizing" the operator.
What I mean by that is if you can find a correlation between where you start,
and where you want to go, you may be able to bypass 5 pages of math because you
can work out a little system to jump from
x^6 + 3x^5 + 9x^4 + 10x^3 + 32x^2 + 975.4x + 111.125 pi

to

6x^5 + 15x^4 + 36x^3 + 30x^2 + 64x + 975.4

in a heartbeat, without actually "doing" any "math".

Once you can systematize and parameterize the more complex equation into smaller
subsets of usuable and changeable fragments, you can then play around and
visualize what's going on with the remaining parts and further dissect the
equations until you have as close to a general solution as possible.

You should be able to bang out something workable in a spreadsheet, SDL,
Mathematica, Matlab, MathCad, etc.

In short, don't get yourself bogged down with understanding the fundamentals of
taking the above derivative if your real goal is to find a _practical_ solution
and USE the results of solving the Laplacian (or any other) complex operator.

If you use POV-Ray to solve / simulate what you want graphically, then you can
Trace() the elements of the grid, come up with some numerical solutions, and
sort of work backwards, or at least have numbers in had to guide you in
unraveling the equations since you can "see" if what you're doing with del this
and del that of x y and z is converging onto or diverging from what you already
know is purty darned close to the "real" mathematical solution.

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