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Before moving on to learning how to solve differential
equations I want give a few final thoughts.
Any differential equations course will concern itself with answering one
or more of the following questions.
- Given a differential equation will a
solution exists?
Not all differential equations will
have solutions so it’s useful to know ahead of time if there is a solution or
not. If there isn’t a solution why waste
our time trying to find something that doesn’t exist?
This question is usually called the
existence question in a differential
equations course.
- If a differential equation does have a
solution how many solutions are there?
As we will see eventually, it is
possible for a differential equation to have more than one solution. We would like to know how many solutions
there will be for a given differential equation.
There is a sub question here as
well. What condition(s) on a
differential equation are required to obtain a single unique solution to the
differential equation?
Both this question and the sub
question are more important than you might realize. Suppose that we derive a differential
equation that will give the temperature distribution in a bar of iron at any
time t. If we solve the differential equation and end
up with two (or more) completely separate solutions we will have problems. Consider the following situation to see this.
If we subject 10 identical iron
bars to identical conditions they should all exhibit the same temperature distribution. So only one of our solutions will be
accurate, but we will have no way of knowing which one is the correct solution.
It would be nice if, during the
derivation of our differential equation, we could make sure that our
assumptions would give us a differential equation that upon solving will yield
a single unique solution.
This question is usually called the
uniqueness question in a
differential equations course.
- If a differential equation does have a
solution can we find it?
This may seem like an odd question
to ask and yet the answer is not always yes.
Just because we know that a solution to a differential equations exists
does not mean that we will be able to find it.
In a first course in differential equations (such as this
one) the third question is the question that we will concentrate on. We will answer the first two equations for
special, and fairly simple, cases, but most of our efforts will be concentrated
on answering the third question for as wide a variety of differential equations
as possible.