Course Materials

The Course Materials page is available for students and faculty to share web-based resources relevant to the course topic. Faculty can provide a list of links to on-line course materials, web sites, databases and other materials pertinent to the course. This is also an appropriate place to post supplementary course materials such as articles, photos and other Web-based media.

Hey Kidz! Time to get ready for the first DE test. Are you ready? Here's a quick review of material covered on Test 1: Enjoy the tune while it's up and Feel good about DE's just like gorillaz.

Trying to save Test2 Review as web page This is a powerpoint Review of Test 2 to refresh and remind yourself of the basic theory.

One of the students (thanks Manuel) found this link to Chapters 1 and 2 which is considerably cleaner than my scans. I'll keep it up as long as I can. Cheers!

Some students have asked me what should be put in a Lab. Here is some general advice about how your report should be organized:

You should have an Introduction which explains what (and why) you are doing this lab.
For each of the different problems you solve you must have something which explains the Procedure you are using. This means you need to explain the model (or DE) you are using. Describe the terms, parameters used, the initial conditions etc. Then include the graph(s) solving the DE. You must Interpret the (labeled) graph and show that this answers the question being asked. Finally, draw the necessary conclusions (if any).
Here is an example of a lab (PDF file) that another student submitted previously. The handwritten comments are mine.
Labs will be graded as follows: E (excellent - you answered the questions graded and you properly used the English language to explain what you did and drew correct conclusions); VG (very good - one of the above was missing, one at least one question); G (good - something more was lacking - graphs were not properly introduced to the reader, or not labeled); P (poor - multiple items missing or lacking in order to get E); NC (no credit - did not do enough, or copied, etc)
Here is Exploration 2.1. The Dead Body problem (Exploration 3.1) is given here. Here is the Slope Field lab (Exploration 2.2). Harvesting a natural resource (Exploration 9.2)

Here's Test 1 from a previous semester

Here are the solutions to Test 2, section 201, 202, and 204.

Here are the solutions to Exam 3

92.234 Students Pick up your exam 3 from here

Here is a link to youtube where someone has posted a 4 min clip of the 1940's Tacoma Narrows Bridge collapse with informative commentary. The insurance policy on the bridge is a fascinating story - search it out if you like a good tale.

There are some outstanding video clips demonstrating applications of Chaos and DE's (including the Lorentz equations) -- this video was made by Steve Strogatz when he was at MIT. The videos titled Nonlinear dynamics and chaos: Lab demonstrations, are stored at Cornell and can be downloaded (Quicktime clips) from

http://dspace.library.cornell.edu/handle/1813/97

Warning: this takes a loooong time to download (152,763Kb). So, start the downloading and then go and clean your basement. When you've finished, the clips will be probably ready for viewing. There is also a pdf file from Strogatz explaining each of the 6 clips.

Here are some power point presentations for some of this material. The sections numbers are from Boyce and DiPrima's book (used by my Andover High students) and not our book, Edwards and Penney.

1.1 Basic Models and Slope Fields

2.1 First order linear DE's

2.2 Separable DE's

2.3 Modeling with First-order DE's

2.4 Linear, Nonlinear and Direction Fields

2.5 Autonomous DE's, Population Models and Logistic growth

2.6 Exact Equations

2.7 Euler's method: Numerical solutions

8.1 Euler, Tan line method (more details)

8.2 Improved Euler

8.3 Runge-Kutta (Improved Euler on Steroids)

3.1 Homogenous equations with constant coefficients