Lectures on Differential Equations

Book excerpt: Lectures on Differential Equations provides a clear and concise presentation of differential equations for undergraduates and beginning graduate students. There is more than enough material here for a year-long course. In fact, the text developed from the author's notes for three courses: the undergraduate introduction to ordinary differential equations, the undergraduate course in Fourier analysis and partial differential equations, and a first graduate course in differential equations. The first four chapters cover the classical syllabus for the undergraduate ODE course leavened by a modern awareness of computing and qualitative methods. The next two chapters contain a well-developed exposition of linear and nonlinear systems with a similarly fresh approach. The final two chapters cover boundary value problems, Fourier analysis, and the elementary theory of PDEs. The author makes a concerted effort to use plain language and to always start from a simple example or application. The presentation should appeal to, and be readable by, students, especially students in engineering and science. Without being excessively theoretical, the book does address a number of unusual topics: Massera's theorem, Lyapunov's inequality, the isoperimetric inequality, numerical solutions of nonlinear boundary value problems, and more. There are also some new approaches to standard topics including a rethought presentation of series solutions and a nonstandard, but more intuitive, proof of the existence and uniqueness theorem. The collection of problems is especially rich and contains many very challenging exercises. Philip Korman is professor of mathematics at the University of Cincinnati. He is the author of over one hundred research articles in differential equations and the monograph Global Solution Curves for Semilinear Elliptic Equations. Korman has served on the editorial boards of Communications on Applied Nonlinear Analysis, Electronic Journal of Differential Equations, SIAM Review, an\ d Differential Equations and Applications.