ES.1803

Differential Equations

5-0-7 units. REST · Undergraduate

Equivalent to 18.03 ; see 18.03 for description. Instruction provided through small, interactive classes. Limited to students in ESG.

Spring 2024

This course, taught to students in MIT’s Experimental Study Group, is equivalent to the Mathematics Department's {{% resource_link "00b12447-b9f1-4cb1-bd91-91e3d42a915d" "*18.03 Differential Equations*" %}}. They satisfy the same prerequisites and are geared to preparing students for downstream science and engineering classes. MIT’s {{% resource_link "bd33c8ac-eda1-410d-956f-9cc763d77b6b" "Experimental Study Group" %}} (ESG) is one of MIT’s first-year learning communities. Small class sizes allow for teaching interactively and staying in close touch with what every student is finding easy or difficult.

Readings

This course didn’t use a textbook, but for many years we used successive versions of C. Edwards and D. Penney’s Elementary Differential Equations with Boundary Value Problems, Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 2003. ISBN: 9780136006138.
Listed reading
As we moved more materials online and especially after adding the unit on linear algebra, we used the textbook less and less until we stopped requiring it. Nonetheless, it remains a big influence. There are several places in the topic notes where we point to this textbook so that interested students can get further details about certain physical systems. The topic notes can be used as the ES.1803 S24: Open Textbook . ↗
Listed reading

Prerequisites & course information

Prereq: None. Coreq: Calculus II (GIR) U (Fall, Spring) 5-0-7 units. REST Credit cannot also be received for 18.03 , 18.032 , CC.1803

Sources

Course catalogue ↗2026–2027
MIT OpenCourseWare ↗Spring 2024
MIT OCW syllabus ↗
MIT OCW calendar ↗
Historical MIT OpenCourseWare offering. Named reading entries and schedule topics are automatically extracted from the linked source pages.