ABSTRACT
Fractional calculus is three centuries old; however, it is not popular among the science and/or engineering community. The traditional integral and derivative are, to say the least, a staple for the technology professional, essential as a means of understanding and working with natural and artificial systems. Fractional calculus is a branch of calculus that generalizes the derivative of a function to noninteger order. The beauty of this subject is that fractional derivatives are not a local property. Fractional differential equations (FDEs) appear more and more frequently in different research areas and engineering applications. In recent years, considerable interest in FDEs has been stimulated due to their numerous applications in the areas of physics and engineering. Many important phenomena in electromagnetics, acoustics, viscoelasticity, electrochemistry, control theory, neutron point kinetic model, anomalous diffusion, Brownian motion, signal and image processing, fluid dynamics, and materials science are well described by differential equations of fractional order.
