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 3.6: Variation of parameters

Differential Equations, Lecture 3.6: Variation of parameters. The solution to a 2nd order linear ODE has the form y(t)=yh(t)+yp(t), where yh(t) solves the related homogeneous equation, and yp(t) is any particular solution. For some ODEs it is easy to guess the form of a particular solution -- and then one uses the method of undetermined coefficients to determine the unknown constants. However, for some forcing terms, like tan t, the particular solution is not so obvious. The method of variation of parameters can be used to find a particular solution for any linear n'th order ODE. We have already encountered this for 1st order equations, and in this lecture we see how it works for 2nd order ODEs. Course webpage (with lecture notes, worksheets, etc.): http://www.math.clemson.edu/~macaule/math2080-online.html


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