MATH 263 Lecture 2: Lecture 2

• School: McGill University
• Department: Mathematics and Statistics
• Course: MATH 263
• Professor: Rohit Jain

Document Summary

In today"s lecture we continue our disucssion of di erential equations and understand what it means to nd a solution. We o er a general classi cation for ordinary di erential equations and highlight some of the major examples we will consider in this course. Last time we discussed mathematical modeling and then derived di erential equations using conservation laws and constitutive equations. Let me point out that an important check that a model is consistent is to check the dimensions (units) of each term appearing in the model. Note the care given in the bacteria example to checking the dimesions of each term in the di erential equation. As a simpler example one should check if the pendulum equation we derived in the last lecture is also dimensionally consistent. Let mass (m) be measured in kilograms, length (l) measured in meters, and time (t) measured in seconds.