Course Title: Ordinary Differential Equations
Course Number: MATH 6410 - 1 / 6840 - 1
Instructor: Andrejs Treibergs
Home Page: http://www.math.utah.edu/~treiberg/M6418.html
Place & Time: M, W, F, 10:45 - 11:35 in JWB 308
Office Hours: 11:45-12:35 M, W, F, in JWB 224 (tent.)
E-mail:
Prerequisites: 'C' or better in math 5210 or consent of instructor.
Main Text: Marcello Viana and Jose M. Espinar, Differential Equations: A Dynamical Systems Approach to Theory and Practice , American Math. Soc., 2021.
ISBN 9781470451141


We shall basically follow the text. But much of the material is standard and widely available. Therefore, students might be able to get by without owning the text, although the majority of the problems will come from the text. I'll provide references and put copies in the math library. Come to class for details and references. Here is a partial list of alternative sources that cover the material.

This is my ninth time teaching Math 6410 and I've tried various texts: Amann, Barriera & Valls, Chicone, Cronin, Liu, Perko, Sideris and Teschl. Perhaps not so unexpectedly, the texts the students liked the best, Perko and Liu, are not the ones I liked the best, Amann, Chicone and Sideris. None of the texts perfectly cover the syllabus of math 6410. Grant's notes as far as they go are modeled on the course he took as a graduate student here at Utah. All the texts cover about two thirds of the syllabus, and the rest has to be supplemented. The authors all ride their hobby horses and discuss favorite special topics beyond what would be appropriate for a beginning course. Most texts for Math 6410 emphasize theory. But a couple of the others, Jordan &. Smith and Schaeffer & Cain are especially good at providing and explaining examples and applications.

This semester I'm also teaching Math 5410 for the sixth time using the text of Hirsch, Smale & Devaney. Other possible texts would have been Bauer & Nohel and M. Taylor. A second semester of ordinary differential equations, Math 5420, is rarely offered. But a companion course also dealing mostly with differential equations, Chaos Theory Math 5470, is offered in the spring, often using the text of Strogatz. It covers many applications using the theory from Math 5410 but does not provide proofs. The two courses usually have disjoint audiences, with Chaos Theory attracting students with majors other than math. An alternative text for Math 5470 may be Robinson.

This course is designed to be a balance of application and theory that is optimized for the needs of students at Utah, be they interested is applied mathematics, mathematical biology, numerical analysis, probability, differential equations or geometric analysis. As mathematicians, it is our prerogative and, indeed duty, to understand why theorems work, so that we may modify or code them as we encounter them in the future.

Texts Suitable for an Undergraduate Course in ODE's.

Texts Suitable for a Graduate Course for Students who have not Studied Measure Theory.

Texts Suitable for a Graduate Course for Students who have Studied Measure Theory.

Specialist's Books on Specific Topics. Unsuitable as a Text for Math 6410.


Last updated: 8 - 2 - 23