Yet another new section in DE book
In trying to avoid bad mood and keep stress level down, people turn to hobbies. One of my hobbies is working on my textbooks, so I have written a new section on the Dirichlet problem for the Laplace equation in the circle for the differential equations book. See the draft section. The previous section 4.9 is OK, but the solution is far more natural in the circle in polar coordinates than in a square, that is we obtain
And then we can derive the Poisson formula which is just cool. Also it’s a good example showing more complicated change of variables since we do it in polar, and also it shows a somewhat more complicated and different separation variables.
Part of the motivation was that I did this topic in my PDE class so I had lecture notes and it really felt right for that point in the book, even to leave it as reading to interested students. The other part is that I have been improving the graphing ability of genius so I can do polar coordinates for example:
That’s the graph of the solution , showing that high frequency on the boundary means fast decay as you go closer to the center of your domain.
Though there is no UI for polar coordinates, there is just a function that allows you to plot arbitrary surface data now. Notice how it’s not graphed on a square grid, but above the disc. Also notice that internal rings have fewer points on them, that’s because I just compute fewer values at smaller radii, remember I am passing in arbitrary data, a list of tripples (x,y,z). This will be in version 1.0.16, which should come out end of next week sometime (have to let translators have a go at it). Actually the reason for doing this work on genius was not polar coordinates but showing numerical solutions in my PDE class. It’s just that one of my test cases was polar coordinates and so it just clicked and I thought: I have to write up this section, it’s just too cool to pass up and I can make the graphs now.
This brings the number of pages in the DE book to 315, and the number of exercises to 533. Yaikes! It’s become a beast. I’ll make the new version in a week or two so that it’s usuable for next semester (so if you have comments on the new section do let me know quickly).
I think now a two semester course could possibly be run out of the book. What’s going to be added in the new version is essentially about 5-6 lectures. At my speed the whole thing is now approximately 65 lectures, so a bit less than two semesters worth, but if you go just a tad slower (as many people do), do more examples, and if you factor in exams, reviews, quizzes, etc… it’s just right I think. You’ve got lots of room to spare if you want a two quarter course.