Topic summary
Perturbation methods
Extracted from the Wikipedia article Perturbation theory.
Prototypical example
Perturbation methods start with a simplified form of the original problem, which is simple enough to be solved exactly. In celestial mechanics, this is usually a Keplerian ellipse. Under Newtonian gravity, an ellipse is exactly correct when there are only two gravitating bodies (say, the Earth and the Moon) but not quite correct when there are three or more objects (say, the Earth, Moon, Sun, and the rest of the Solar System) and not quite correct when the gravitational interaction is stated using formulations from general relativity.