In this section we need to take a look at the equation of a line in R 3 R 3 . As we saw in the previous section the equation y = m x + b y = m x + b does not describe a line in R 3 R 3 , instead it describes a plane. This doesn’t mean however that we can’t write down an equation for a line in 3-D space. We’re just going to need a new way of writing down the equation of a curve. So, before we get into the equations of lines we first need to briefly look at vector functions. We’re going to take a more in depth look at vector functions later. At this point all that we need to worry about is notational issues and how they can be used to give the equation of a curve. The best way to get an idea of what a vector function is and what its graph looks like is to look at an example. So, consider the following vector function. → r ( t ) = ⟨ t , 1 ⟩ r → ( t ) = ⟨ t , 1 ⟩ A vector function is a function that takes one or more variables, one in this case, and returns a...
t’s now time to start thinking about how to solve non-homogeneous differential equations. A second order, linear non-homogeneous differential equation is
where is a non-zero function. Note that we didn’t go with constant coefficients here because everything that we’re going to do in this section doesn’t require it. Also, we’re using a coefficient of 1 on the second derivative just to make some of the work a little easier to write down. It is not required to be a 1.
Before talking about how to solve one of these we need to get some basics out of the way, which is the point of this section.
First, we will call
the associated homogeneous differential equation to .
Now, let’s take a look at the following theorem.
Theorem
Suppose that and are two solutions to and that and are a fundamental set of solutions to the associated homogeneous differential equation then,
is a solution to and it can be written as
is a solution to and it can be written as
Note the notation used here. Capital letters referred to solutions to while lower case letters referred to solutions to . This is a fairly common convention when dealing with non-homogeneous differential equations.
This theorem is easy enough to prove so let’s do that. To prove that is a solution to all we need to do is plug this into the differential equation and check it.
We used the fact that and are two solutions to in the third step. Because they are solutions to we know that
So, we were able to prove that the difference of the two solutions is a solution to .
Proving that
is even easier. Since and are a fundamental set of solutions to we know that they form a general solution and so any solution to can be written in the form
Well, is a solution to , as we’ve shown above, therefore it can be written as
So, what does this theorem do for us? We can use this theorem to write down the form of the general solution to . Let’s suppose that is the general solution to and that is any solution to that we can get our hands on. Then using the second part of our theorem we know that
where and are a fundamental set of solutions for . Solving for gives,
We will call
the complementary solution and a particular solution. The general solution to a differential equation can then be written as.
So, to solve a non-homogeneous differential equation, we will need to solve the homogeneous differential equation, , which for constant coefficient differential equations is pretty easy to do, and we’ll need a solution to .
This seems to be a circular argument. In order to write down a solution to we need a solution. However, this isn’t the problem that it seems to be. There are ways to find a solution to . They just won’t, in general, be the general solution. In fact, the next two sections are devoted to exactly that, finding a particular solution to a non-homogeneous differential equation.
There are two common methods for finding particular solutions : Undetermined Coefficients and Variation of Parameters. Both have their advantages and disadvantages as you will see in the next couple of sections.
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