Differential equations are not just a bag of tricks says math professor

• June 23, 2010 5:55am

Assistant Professor of Mathematics & Computer Science Shirley Yap contributed an article to Mathematics magazine on a computational method first introduced by Norwegian mathematician Sophus Lie.

In her article titled, “Differential Equations—Not Just a Bag of Tricks!” Yap writes, “Differential equations often seem like a hodgepodge of techniques designed to solve very specific equations. There is, however, a unifying theme for many of those techniques, which is to find the right coordinate system with which to express the equation. In the mid-nineteenth century, Sophus Lie discovered how to unify and extend many of the techniques that existed at his time by using the symmetries of differential equations to find good coordinate systems.”

KL