Differential Equations

I’ve realized that a lot of people are nervous about differential equations. Which is understandable, but in general there’s some pretty straightforward ways to solve a fair number of the ones you come across. I’d really like to write some of it up.

My basic idea is going to be, show a bit about integrating factors, a bit about separation of variables, the characteristic equation, and the method of undetermined coefficients. That covers a lot of physical territory. Then some about reducing order with transformations from n-th order equations to n 1-st order equations, and basic Laplace for a sortof general method. And finally, maybe a tiny bit about numeric methods.

I can almost justify doing this before Monday, since it’d be useful on the dynamical systems final. I might give that a shot this weekend to see what I can crank out.