Description

This book consists of ten weeks of material given as a course on ordinary differential equations (ODEs) for second year mathematics majors at the University of Bristol. It is the first course devoted solely to differential equations that these students will take. This book consists of 10 chapters/ and the course is 12 weeks long. Each chapter is covered in a week/ and in the remaining two weeks I summarize the entire course/ answer lots of questions/ and prepare the students for the exam. I do not cover the material in the appendices in the lectures. Some of it is basic material that the students have already seen that I include for completeness and other topics are "tasters" for more advanced material that students will encounter in later courses or in their project work. Students are very curious about the notion of chaos/ and I have included some material in an appendix on that concept. The focus in that appendix is only to connect it with ideas that have been developed in this course related to ODEs and to prepare them for more advanced courses in dynamical systems and ergodic theory that are available in their third and fourth years.