Talk:Ordinary differential equation

The first paragraph is not quite technically correct. It's not a bad start, but should be refined a bit.

If you could elaborate in its technical incorrectness, I'll get refining... GWO

Now you have something to pull apart...RoseParks

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Just a typesetting note: when doing some minor copyediting here, I discovered that using an ordinary apostrope (') for the "prime" sign really wreaks havoc on the Wiki software (especially when doubled), since it tries to interpret them as bold, italics, etc. The "correct" thing to do would be to use ′, but some browsers won't handle that well, and there's no other tricky notation on this page to justify the use of special characters. So I have used the bare-acute-accent character ´ (decimal 0180) for the prime symbol. It should work on all browsers using either ISO or Windows ANSI, and doesn't screw up the Wiki software. --LDC

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Superb!

Now for the nits... (heh) For an ODE, we really speak of a function x of a single parameter t, that is, x = x(t)...

The really frustrating thing about math is that so much of the notation I learned in lower division I more or less had to unlearn in upper division or grad level classes.

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Perhaps some mention of the different types of differential equations and methods for solving them would be appropriate (i.e. linear first and second order, etc.) --BlackGriffen

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No talk at all about the relationship to Vector fields, which are really ODEs wearing funny hats, except they exist on differential manifolds and can be defined without co-ordinates.

Would you like to add a paragraph about that connection? AxelBoldt

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Is there any reason why this article uses the plural title?

nope. should be fixed. AxelBoldt

yep. "Differential Equations" is the name of a field of study in math. A "differential equation" (singular) would be the object of that field of study. I will move the article to the singular, leaving a link from the plural. Ed Poor

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I believe that the history section here ought to be rewritten preferrably by someone who knows something about it and doesn't simply 'copy' a 100+ year old book on the subject - and doesn't tell that's what have been done! I see that there are a number of references to 'recent works', 'the modern school' and so on, when referring to texts written well over a century ago! 'Recent writers' refer to (amongst others) Klein (-1925), Weierstrass (-1897) and Frobenius (1849-1917). Do you agree that the history part here should be deleted? Mikez 18:00, 23 Feb 2004 (UTC)

Please don't delete. Quite a bit of work has been done already - obviously it is still in a bad state, but starting again with nothing isn't a good idea. In the end there will have to be major changes - of course.

Charles Matthews 18:13, 23 Feb 2004 (UTC)