Differential Equations

This playlist contains 32.5 hours across 52 video lectures from my Differential Equations course (Math 2080) at Clemson University. After teaching this course 9 times during the academic year, I offered it online and made these videos. Every time I taught it, I would discover a better way to present the material until it finally "converged" to its present form, which I am very happy with. It's remarkable how much one can learn from teaching a course, even if one knows the material very well. For many, if not most undergraduate STEM majors, Differential Equations is the most important math class they will take. Unfortunately, the way that it is usually taught lacks some of the key intution, and presents the material as a "cook book" of how to solve a variety of ODEs. As a result, students usually miss the "big picture", which is quite beautiful. In this course, I make a special effort to explain the simple intuition behind the scenes, because understanding that makes so much of the content much more straightforward and natural. My presentation of the material does really not follow any textbook. Despite this, most textbooks (at least those "with boundary value problems") would serve as a decent reference, as they contain most of this content. That said, in this day and age, so does the internet. I have a course webpage, where I make the content freely available. With each lecture, I post the slides and a worksheet containing what I consider to be the fundamental practice problems for that topic. It should be very conducive to self-study. http://www.math.clemson.edu/~macaule/math2080-online.html Can't get enough? Check out my course "Advanced Engineering Mathematics", which can be thought of as the natural follow-up to this course. http://www.math.clemson.edu/~macaule/math4340-online.html

Curated by: Professor Macauley (52 videos)


Currently Playing: Differential Equations, Lecture 6.1: Introduction to Fourier series

Differential Equations, Lecture 6.1: Introduction to Fourier series. Any musician or audio engineer can tell you that any sound wave can be decomposed into its fundamental frequencies. Mathematical, this means that any periodic function can be written uniquely as a sum of sine and cosine waves. Knowing this is useless unless we actually know how to do this, which is what we derive in this lecture. To summarize, we can decompose any vector in R^n as a sum of unit basis vectors using projections, which use the dot product. Similarly, the set of 2pi-periodic functions can be though of as a collection of abstract vectors, and we can define a generalized notion of dot product, called an inner product. Once we do this, we get for free how to decompose any 2pi-periodic function into sine and cosine waves, and the formulas are quite simple. Course webpage (with lecture notes, worksheets, etc.): http://www.math.clemson.edu/~macaule/math2080-online.html


Tracks in this Playlist