Math 131: Partial differential equations I

Course Info

Office hours	Monday 1:00 -- 3:00 in 382-F Additionally the CA Brian Krummel in will hold office hours on Tuesdays 2:15--3:15, 4:00--5:00, and Wednesdays 1:30--3:30, 4:00--5:00 380-S.
Email list	All registered students should be automatically subscribed to the students mailing list. If by error you are NOT subscribed to this list, then subscribe yourself to math131-win0708-guests. Any email announcement sent by me will also be sent to this list. Note: Any requests to me to either subscribe or un-subscribe you to these email lists will be (silently) ignored. You can subscribe yourself from the above link. You can unsubscribe yourself by following the link in the footer of every list email you get.
Midterm	Tuesday fourth week (Jan 29) in class
Final	Thursday Mar 20th, 12:15--3:15 (as scheduled by the registrar)

Syllabus

Given that there are roughly 50 students, most of whom are not math majors, I will not stray much from your textbook. The course will roughly consist of the first six chapters of your text.

Grading and other policies

Grading Your final grade will be the average of your homework, midterm and final with the midterm counting as 30%, final 50% and your homework 20%.

Homework Homework will be assigned every week on Tuesday, and due in class on the following Tuesday at the beginning of class. Late homework will NEVER be accepted. If you have an exceptionally good reason for not turning in the homework on time, then I might be persuaded to not counting that homework towards your grade. But under no circumstances will I accept your homework late! (As an incentive: If you never make an excuse, and turn in all your homework on time, I will not count your lowest score towards your grade.

Working in groups on your homework is encouraged, but blindly copying will certainly guarantee miserable performance on all exams.

Midterm As mentioned in class, your midterm is optional in the following sense: I will only count it towards your final grade if it helps your final grade. Your score on your midterm ROUGHLY corresponds to a grade as follows: 28 and up is an A. 20 and up is a B. 13 and up is a C.

Homework Assignments

Note: The problems are assigned from the Second Edition. If you still have the First edition, then look here for details on how to interpret the problem numbers.

Page 1 (Assignments 1 -- 2)
Page 2 (Assignment 3)
Page 3 (Assignments 4 -- 5)
Page 4 (Assignments 6 -- ?)

Solutions

Solutions to homework will eventually be posted here. Alternately, you can directly via AFS at /afs/ir/class/math131/WWW/solutions/

Handouts

A midterm from last quarter (and solutions).
A midterm from Winter '06, and a midterm from Winter '07 with solutions.
Your midterm with solutions.
Lecture notes for convergence of Fourier series: For easy viewing or for eco-friendly printing
Three finals from previous years. 1 2 3 NOTE:These are finals from previous years, not sample finals. (I.e. don't expect your final to be the same as one of these with the numbers changed.)
A note on Q6.3
Solutions (written by Tsz Ho Fong) to last quarter's homework on Harmonic functions. (NOTE: His solution of the first problem requires the spherical laplacian in n dimensions. So I wrote up a solution that does NOT require this formula.)

Text book

W. Strauss Partial Differential Equations: An Introduction.

Feedback

Feedback at any time (either anonymous or signed) is always appreciated. You can use this form to send me (or your course assistant) anonymous (or signed) feedback. [Note: Evil spammers have been using this form to clutter my INBOX. Thus I have restricted access to this form to within stanford.edu domain.]

Questions? Comments? Send me hate mail? . Public Key DB04C471

"I'm sorry I couldn't turn in my homework. I was watching the world series and got tied up proving it's absolute convergence."

Last modified: Thu 13 Mar 2008 12:58:29 PM PDT