[3620] in Depressing_Thoughts
Re: 18.03 woes
nosaj@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (nosaj@ATHENA.MIT.EDU)
Sun Feb 7 23:06:11 1993
18.03 just sucks anyway.
All the important stuff for diff. eq.'s I've learned elsewhere
as well as 18.03, and often they teach it better there.
(IMHO they did a horrible job of teaching Fourier series in 18.03)
As for usefulness, I would guess that 95% of the time
you either get a simple linear differential equation
or a really ugly nonlinear differential equation
when you try to solve a physical problem.
Sometimes I wish that they had talked more about the
"issues" of differential equations in 18.03 rather
than the specific techniques of how to solve them.
The course syllabus sort of reminds me of a manual
for a TI scientific calculator: you can read the
thing all you want, but you won't actually learn
much until you see a real-world application
and get experience on your own.
oh, well.
