The mathematical study of potentials's known as potential theory; it's the study of harmonic functions on manifolds. This mathematical formulation arises from the fact that, in physics, the scalar potential's irrotational, and thus has a vanishing Laplacian — the very definition of a harmonic function. In physics, a potential may refer to the scalar potential or to the vector potential. In either case, it's a field defined in space, from which many important physical properties may be de… (More on Potential)