[3617] in Depressing_Thoughts
Re: 18.03 woes
zeno@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (zeno@ATHENA.MIT.EDU)
Sun Feb 7 20:37:13 1993
It's probably no consolation, but I'm a mathematician (well, kind of)
and I think the entire topic of diff. eqs. is a Depressing Thought in
and of itself. Certainly 18.03 is: a big jumbled mess of tricks and
disconnected ideas. Besides which, if you pick a "random differential
equation" it has "probability" 0 of being solvable in closed form (where
those terms can be made precise for this context). The saving grace is
that some of the methods turn out to be pretty darn useful sometimes.
