Differential operator

Imagine you have a toy car and you want to know how fast it's going. The way you find out is by looking at how the car's position changes over time. This is called differentiation.

A differential operator is like a tool that helps us do differentiation. It's a fancy way of saying "a thing that helps us find out how things change."

For example, the most common differential operator is called the derivative. If you want to find out how fast your toy car is going, you take the derivative of its position with respect to time. This tells you how much its position is changing over time, and therefore how fast it's going.

But differential operators don't just apply to toy cars. They can be used to understand how anything changes over time, from stock market trends to the weather. And they don't just tell us how fast things are changing, but also how much they're changing in different directions.

So, a differential operator is kind of like a magical tool that helps us understand the world and all the ways it changes.