Talk:Initial value problem

Hello. It's not clear to me how this article & the other articles on diff eqs should be organized. One approach would be to put a short defn here, and then link to the main diff eq article. However, it might be neater to have the main page give an overview of several topics, one of which is the IVP, and then hand it off to this page, and put a detailed treatment of the IVP here. Maybe someone would like to comment on this question. Happy editing, Wile E. Heresiarch 04:06, 2 Mar 2004 (UTC)

Generally, I would say that differential equations is such a large topic that we should be selective in what we put in the Differential Equation article. Specifically, I am wondering what you want to say about IVPs. The only thing that comes to my mind is that they have a unique solution, which is such an important property that it should be in the Differential Equation page, in my opinion. By the way, nice work on the ODE-related pages. -- Jitse Niesen 15:34, 4 Mar 2004 (UTC)

I have changed some things that I think are important on the definition. An IVP for a DE is in fact, more generally, a relation between a function in $\mathbb {R} \times \mathbb {R} ^{n}\,$ and its derivatives with respect to time $t\,$ , actually $f\,$ is defined on an open set, here we see just the one-dimensional case, I changed it to n-dimensional case, I don't think engineers have any problem to change n by 1 to understand the same problem in the one-dimensional case :). Another thing is that the Picard's existence and uniqueness of solutions of the Cauchy's Problem or IVP states that if $f\,$ is continious and Lipschitz with respect to $x\,$ then we have existence and uniqueness in a neighbourhood of $t_{0}\,$ which actually can be found explicitly. It is not necessary to claim any kind of smoothness on $f\,$ ! Of course smoothness on $x\,$ implies Lipschitzian condition with respect to $x\,$ .

Difficulties and Confusion

Great job on the article writers on making a text book example of a text book definition. How many articles are there on the internet that make a simple concept so complex and scientific so that the average person goes "wow, I hate math, maybe I should pick a degree in Business or Writing". Articles like these contribute to the lowering of the number of engineers, mathematicians, scientists around the world. When will you guys understand you have to think with a newbie head to teach a newbie. At least people in the programming and web development field have figured out ways to make things so much more simpler to explain.

Your article should contain simple and effective language and a couple mathematical examples with solutions that are not similar to a text book that seems to skip steps and make things look complicated.198.82.127.163 03:55, 10 September 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Worked example

I came to this page after seeing the following problem [1] and agree with the anonymous editor above that this article needs simpler and more effective language. I have added a simple worked example of the 'Fail Blog' problem, following the method at [2]. —Preceding unsigned comment added by BruceMcAdam (talk • contribs) 15:01, 28 October 2009 (UTC)[reply]

That means what did you do on bayram holiday? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 193.140.249.2 (talk) 15:38, 20 May 2010 (UTC)[reply]