Chapter 0: Introduction

This book originated from my class notes for Math 286 at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) in Fall 2008 and Spring 2009. It is a first course on differential equations for engineers. Using this book, I also taught Math 285 at UIUC, Math 20D at University of California, San Diego (UCSD), and Math 4233 at Oklahoma State University (OSU). Normally these courses are taught with Edwards and Penney, Differential Equations and Boundary Value Problems: Computing and Modeling [EP], or Boyce and DiPrima’s Elementary Differential Equations and Boundary Value Problems [BD], and this book aims to be more or less a drop-in replacement. Other books I used as sources of information and inspiration are E.L. Ince’s classic (and inexpensive) Ordinary Differential Equations [I], Stanley Farlow’s Differential Equations and Their Applications [F], now available from Dover, Berg and McGregor’s Elementary Partial Differential Equations [BM], and William Trench’s free book Elementary Differential Equations with Boundary Value Problems [T]. See the Further Reading chapter at the end of the book.