ELI5: Explain Like I'm 5

Gauss–Laguerre quadrature

Have you ever heard of the word "Quadrature"? It has nothing to do with gymnastics, but it's a fancy math term that means finding the area under a curve. Now, how do we find that area? One way is to use a technique called Gauss-Laguerre quadrature.

To understand this, imagine you have many little pieces of a pie, and you want to add up all of their areas to find out how big the whole pie is. But counting each little piece one by one would take forever, so instead, we use a trick. We can estimate the area of each piece by looking at the sides of the pie that it touches.

Gauss-Laguerre quadrature works similarly, but instead of looking at the sides of a pie, it uses some fancy math. It uses a formula to find the approximate area under a curve between two points, without actually adding up all of the little pieces in between.

But wait, why do we need this? Can't we just use a calculator to add up all the little pieces? Well, sometimes the curve we're trying to measure is very complicated and has no simple formula. Other times, there might be so many little pieces that it's impossible to add them all up in a reasonable amount of time. Gauss-Laguerre quadrature can help us quickly and accurately find the area under a curve, even when it might seem impossible.

So that's Gauss-Laguerre quadrature. It's just a fancy math technique that helps us find the area under a curve quickly and accurately, without having to count all of the little pieces.