Solving Differential Equations with Mathematica's Solver

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Assuming that you made no mistakes, (and it would be pretty hard to do so given that all you had to do was type seven letters and hit [ENTER]), you should have gotten an output from Mathematica that looked something like the following:

?DSolve
DSOLVE Syntax

Notice that this description of DSolve tells us that there are actually six ways that the command can be used:

In this class we will only use the first and third of these choices. "DSolve[eqn,u,x]" tells us how to solve a single differential equation, whereas "DSolve[{eqn1,eqn2,…},{u1,u1,…},]" is the command we'd use to solve a system of differential equations. We haven't even done systems in class yet, so we'll stick to single equations for a while.

Anyway, let's get started on giving DSolve a work-out. We'll see how it handles some basic first-order problems you might encounter on a typical early exam in this course.

So, moving on...

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