Summer-Fall 1994

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Editor's Corner
By Michael Moody

A report from a workshop at Washington State University on what new content should be incorporated into a ODEs course and what content could be removed.

The Memoirs of a Differential Equations Junkie
By Tyre Newton

My aim in writing this is to convince the reader that differential equations (ordinary), considered in a qualitative and graphical sense, can be fun. To me, mathematics is primarily a science of prediction. To analyze, via differential equations, the mathematical description of a dynamical process and to see it behave graphically as predicted, never ceases to give me a thrill.

An Experimental Harvest from the Logistic Equation
By Steve Clark; Scott Coble; Tim Randolph; Michael Moody

There are many models used by ecologists and wildlife biologists to describe the effects of harvesting on resource populations. Though many of these models are more complicated than those that we have investigated above, our simple model shares several important kinds of behavior with them. In particular, we show that over-exploitation can lead to ruin; that whether or not a given harvest rate is sustainable may depend on the initial state of a population; and that seasonal harvesting can be adjusted to accommodate sustainable exploitation of a resource.

Differential Equations at Midwestern State
By Mark Ferris

The author describes his experience teaching a first-year differential equations course at Midwestern State and the topics that he chose to include.

The Average Distance Between Points in a Disk
By Steven Dunbar; Richard Bernatz

This authors describe how a question about the foraging behavior of some animals leads to a mathematical question about the average distance between two randomly chosen points in a geometric figure as that figure size grows.

Review of Differential Equations with Mathematica
By Marie Vanisko

The author reviews "Differential Equations with Mathematica," a handbook or supplementary text for an undergraduate course in differential equations.

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