Elementary Differential Equations

This is MAP 2302, Section 4689.

Time and place:
MWF 4th Period (10:40-11:30), LIT 207.

Instructor:
Patrick De Leenheer
Office: 411 Little Hall
Office Hours: MWF 3rd Period (9:35-10:25) or by appointment.
Email: deleenhe@math.ufl.edu
URL: www.math.ufl.edu/~deleenhe

Prerequisites:
Calculus 2 (MAC 2312, MAC 3512, or MAC 3473).

Text:
Fundamentals of Differential Equations and Boundary Value Problems, 4th Edition, by R. Kent Nagle and Edward B. Saff.

Course Objectives:
Introduction to ordinary differential equations (ODE's); classification of ODE's (linear, nonlinear, higher order); ODE's as models of physical systems (mechanics, electrical circuits, fluids, thermodynamics, biology, chemistry); techniques for solving ODE's; Laplace transforms.

Topics:
We will cover the first 7 chapters of the text.

Grading:
Course grades will be determined by your performance on 4 -approximately monthly- homework assignments and 3 in class exams.
Late HW is not accepted.
The weights are: 25% for all HW, 25% per exam.
In addition to the graded HW, there will be weekly HW assignments which will not be collected/graded.

Grading Scale (maximum of 100%):

A: [>=85%]   B+: [76-84%]     B: [70-75%] C+: [65-69%]   
C: [60-64%]   D+: [55-59%]     D: [50-54%]    E: [<50%] 

Guidelines, tips, How to study and prepare for exams? etc:
Although the weekly HW assigments will not be collected, I strongly encourage you to work on these problems in a timely fashion. They will prepare you for the next classes, deepen your understanding, and reveal where you have certain deficiencies with the material covered up to that point. My personal experience is that students who don't keep up with these weekly HW's suddenly find themselves behind a lot and spend the rest of the semester "catching up". Don't let it get that far!
In parallel you should also attempt to solve the monthly HW assigments. I urge you not to postpone working on these problems until the week or evening before they are due as they will generally require substantial time for you to solve. As a guideline I would say that each problem will take you about an afternoon or evening, and I expect there will be about 5 to 6 problems per assignment. The problems on the exams will be very similar in nature to those assigned, so you can draw your own conclusions ... Of course, due to the time constraint of 50 minutes for an in class exam, you can expect the exam problems to be substantially shorter. Typically, before each exam there will be 1 review session. The purpose of this session is to discuss the problems of a practice exam that I will post online beforehand. In addition you can ask me about any doubts/issues you may have regarding/with the exam material.
I am not taking attendance for this class, but occasionally some material covered will not be in the textbook. So my personal opinion is that showing up for class is a good idea. It is each student's responsibility to know what exactly has been taught. In particular, in general there will not be any handouts of lecture notes on such additional topics, and it should not be expected that the instructor will teach this material again during office hours (or via email) to students who have missed a class.

University policy on accommodations for students with disabilities:
"Students requesting classroom accommodation must first register with the Dean of Students Office. The Dean of Students Office will provide documentation to the student who must then provide this documentation to the Instructor when requesting accommodation."