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InstructorIsidora MilinOffice: 337 Illini Hall Email: imilin [at] illinois [dot] edu Office HoursTuesdays 11AM - 1 PMThursdays 11AM - 1PM 337 Illini Hall / Espresso Royale TutoringMonday - Thursday 7-9 PM in 2 Illini HallEnter through South/North doors - these are not locked! Course Information
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Math 285 - Introduction to Differential Equations
Any physical law can (generally) be encoded as a differential equation - thus, understanding (and having a working knowledge of) differential equations is critical to understanding almost all of the material you will encounter in subsequent science and engineering classes (and careers!). In fact, you can think of the study of differential equations in this course as one of the crucial steps in learning the mathematical language of engineering and science.
Given a real world problem, (after perhaps making some simplifying assumptions), you create a mathematical model of it by translating it into a differential equation (or a system of equations), analize this model and then interpret the results of your analysis in terms of the real world context you started off with. As we shall see in this course, the mathematical analysis involved in this middle step - which is our main focus in this course - is usually more than a simple matter of following some universal prescription/algorithm, and there is quite a bit to it!
Course Outline
- firrst order differential equations
- linear equations of higher order
- Fourier series and their applications to differential equations
- selected topics in Sturm-Liouville theory and natural frequences
- Laplace transform methods (as time permits)
