Mathematics Seminar - Cinzia Soresina, University of Graz

Title: When things become more complicated: the driven harmonic oscillator and why/how we care about inhomogeneous ODEs

Abstrract:

In the previous lectures, we learned how to solve linear homogeneous differential equations with constant coefficients. This is only a first step since this class of ODEs finds few applications in the real world. In this lecture, we will consider the driven harmonic oscillator as a case study where linear inhomogeneous differential equations with constant coefficients come into play, and we will learn solution techniques for this more general class of ODEs. However, there is more to the story, since Nature is often nonlinear and nonconstant!