Spring 2009
110.306 - Honors Differential Equations |
Office Hours: Held in Krieger 313.
Section: Friday 12:00 - 12:50, also in Maryland 310.
Textbooks:
Elementary Differential Equations (with Boundary Value Problems)
Differential Equations, Dynamical Systems, and an Introduction to Chaos
Additional Resources: There are a number of Java Applets designed to help you understand the behavior of ODEs on a visual level. By taking the work out of producing diagrams and slope fields, this enables you to play with examples and look for patterns without getting bogged down in detailed computations. Click here to use Marek Rychlik's JOde Applets Prerequisites: Concepts and techniques from Calculus II (110.109) and Linear Algebra (110.201) are essential to the subject, so these courses (or equivalent) are required. Ideas from multivariable calculus will be introduced and explained as they appear. Homework: The course syllabus and a list of homework assignments will be posted here. Homework assignments are due in lecture on Monday. You are permitted, perhaps encouraged, to discuss homework problems with other students. This collaboration should not extend to the process of writing up solutions. The work that you turn in should be written by you, in your own words, without supervision or other well-meaning influence from anyone else.
Grading:
15% Homework, 20% Each Midterm Exam,
45% Final Exam.
Exam Dates:
Midterms in class on Wednesday, Feb. 25 and Wednesday, Apr. 8.
You are expected to attend class and take exams as they are scheduled. Unexcused absence from the midterm exam carries a penalty of one full letter grade reduction from your final course grade. Students who miss the final exam, without a valid and well-documented explanation will automatically fail the course. Medical Contingencies: Missed midterm exams will not be made up; the remaining homework and final exam will be given correspondingly more weight to take up the slack. In order to do this, I must receive written confirmation of the severity of your illness, and preferably a letter from the Dean's office requesting special consideration. The Student Health Center recently adopted new guidelines for the issuance of written Medical Excuses. Please read this memorandum for more information. A one-sentence summary is that the Health Center will now only document serious and/or prolonged illnesses for which they have actively provided treatment. Students with disabilities requiring accommodation should notify me
as soon as possible so that we can make the appropriate arrangements.
Ethics Statement: Cheating is wrong. Cheating hurts our community by undermining academic integrity, creating mistrust, and fostering unfair competition. The university will punish cheaters with failure on an assignment, failure in a course, permanent transcript notation, suspension, and/or expulsion. Offenses may be reported to medical, law, or other professional or graduate schools when a cheater applies. Violations can include cheating on exams, plagiarism, reuse of assignments without permission, improper use of the Internet and electronic devices unauthorized collaboration, alteration of graded assignments, forgery and falsification, lying, facilitating academic dishonesty, and unfair competition. Ignorance of these rules is not an excuse. In this course you may collaborate with other students while attempting to solve homework problems, but only under the guidelines described above. Your work on any exam, whether in class or take-home, must be entirely your own. If you are having difficulty with a particular exam question, it is permissible to ask the instructor (but no-one else) for clarification. For more information, see the guidebook
"Academic Ethics for
Undergraduates" and the
Undergraduate Ethics Board web site.
Feedback: You may submit comments about the course at any time using this form which is provided by the Mathematics department. Your comments are then e-mailed to the undergraduate program coordinators and to the department chair (but not to me). |