Questions that involve a replacement of variable(s) in an expression or a formula.
In mathematics, the operation of substitution consists in replacing all the occurrences of a free variable appearing in an expression or a formula by a number or another expression. In other words, an expression involving free variables may be considered as defining a function, and substituting values to the variables in the expression is equivalent to applying the function defined by the expression to these values. A change of variables is commonly a particular type of substitution, where the substituted values are expressions that depend on other variables. This is a standard technique used to reduce a difficult problem to a simpler one. A change of coordinates is a common type of change of variables. However, if the expression in which the variables are changed involves derivatives or integrals, the change of variable does not reduce to a substitution.
