Winter 1996

Cover

 

The Future ODE Course is Already Here
By Robert L. Devaney

"In thinking about how the elementary differential equations syllabus will change over the next five or ten years, I went back to my syllabus from 1982. That was the last time I taught a 'traditional' ODE course, before becoming involved with the Boston University ODE project some ten years later. Looking at that document, I was amazed to see how far we have come..."

Detecting a Leak in an Underground Storage Tank
By E. Aboufadel; S.J. Tavener

The authors recast the traditional mixing problem as an inverse problem, suitable for a sophmore-level course on differential equations.

Small Mammal Dispersion
By Ray Huffaker; Thomas LoFaro; Kevin Cooper

A trapping strategy that disregards the possible migratory behavior of beavers in neighboring "uncontrolled" (i.e., zero trapping) land parcels in filling the vacuum created by trapping in the "controlled" parcel, can be as futile in practice as attempting to dig a hole in fine-grain sand. We formulate a two-equation system of differential equations to model this phenomenon according to the recently formulated "social-fence" hypothesis of small mammal dispersion.

Orbits Worth Betting On
By Rob Knapp; Stan Wagon

In this article, the authors discuss the steps that one can take to ensure, or at least put the odds in one's favor, that a numerical solution to a sensitive equation is correct.

New ODE Solvers: Time and Event Location
By Mark Reichelt; Larry Shampine

The authors describe advances in the numerical ODE solver package for MATLAB. Two new features are numerical methods for stiff differential equations, and the capability of solvers to locate events.

Back matter