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 3.7: Cauchy-Euler equations

Differential Equations, Lecture 3.7: Cauchy-Euler equations. In this lecture we encounter for the first time 2nd order ODEs with variable coefficients. The simplest of these are called "Cauchy-Euler equations", which have the form ax^2y''+bxy'+cy=0. The solutions of these ODEs are y(x)=x^r for some constant r, which is the root of a degree-2 polynomial. As before, there are three cases to be treated separately: distinct real roots, complex roots, and repeated roots. We also see how to convert Cauchy-Euler equations into ODEs with constant coefficients using a clever substitution. Course webpage (with lecture notes, worksheets, etc.): http://www.math.clemson.edu/~macaule/math2080-online.html


Tracks in this Playlist