Welcome to the HomePage for
Partial Differential Equations

On Nov. 7, 1940 the Tacoma Narrows bridge in Washington State collapsed. This crash generated many engineering studies of resonance, vibrations, and of the mathematical models that describe such phenomenon. Some of those mathematical considerations are explored in these pages
If your browser is setup to play mpeg files you may want to see a movie of the bridge just before its collapse.


From the Mathematics Department,
Washington State University

Here is information on the Current Spring Math440 class, including Exams, Syllabus, Homework Assignments and......

This site gives links that study Ordinary and Partial Differential Equations. We also give links to the study of Fourier Series (and more general orthogonal series) as well as a sections on the associated Sturm-Liouville ordinary differential equations and special functions of mathematical physics such as Legendre Polynomials, Bessel Functions and other Peoples Polynomials.

For each of these subjects, we provide downloadable notebooks (" *.ma" files) that use the Mathematica program to generate many different examples of solving PDE's as well as computing with ordinary differential equations and the associated orthogonal series. Most of these applications generate graphical output. To modify and use the *.ma files the reader must have access to Mathematica from some other source. However, there is a program available from the Wolfram Mathematica site that will allow the user to simply view but not to modify the examples of Mathematica notebooks presented here

The *.ma files are executable macros that may be loaded into Mathematica providing relatively simple ways to study these differential equations. We also include downloadable help files for modifying these *.ma files to solve other classes of problems instead of the specific examples given. Click on one of the following subjects to proceed.

Some of these links only have a few graphics and, as yet, no *.ma files.

Power Series Methods for Ordinary DEQ's Bessel Functions Legendre Polynomials
Sturm Liouville Equations Trigonometric Fourier Series. General Orthogonal Series.
Diffusion Equation in One and Two Dimensions Laplace Equation in Two Dimensions Wave Equation in One and Two Dimensions

This page was created by David Barnes and Don Kenning. Click here to send Email to


David Barnes and/or Don Kenning.

There is more mathematical (and all kinds of other) information available at their personal WEB pages.

Home page for Barnes and Home page for Kenning

This page is copyright by the WSU research foundation 1996, all rights reserved.

Nov. 1