From organism Tue Oct 30 21:32:42 2001
Date: Tue, 30 Oct 2001 21:32:09 -0600 (CST)
From: jr <organism>
To: someone
Subject: Re: Trouble with mathematica

Ahhhh, the joys of leaving an assignment to the last minute.... >;)

Short answer: Maple does this very easily.  Check out Maple.

Long answer: I was mistaken.  Mathematica does not have a simple built-in
facility for providing series solutions to differential equations.  Either
you're going to have to wait for them to write one, or you're going to have
to figure out how to do this yourself.  This has been part of my repeated
advice: sometimes Maple and Mathematica can't solve the whole problem for
you - you need to use them to solve pieces of your problem, and put things
together yourself.  You might have noted this as a disadvantage in
homework project 3 (or you can, now, in homework project 4).

Fortunately for you, people have within the past ten years authored a lot
of educational material which they've posted on the web which'll make your
job a lot easier.  For instance, check out:

http://www.ecs.fullerton.edu/~mathews/N310/projects3/e21.htm
http://www.ecs.fullerton.edu/~mathews/N310/projects3/e22.htm

http://www.ma.umist.ac.uk/kd/ode/3x/examples/chap20.nb
http://www.ma.umist.ac.uk/kd/ode/3x/examples/chap21.nb
http://www.ma.umist.ac.uk/kd/ode/3x/labs/asst6.nb
You'll need to get the following package for the above:
http://www.ma.umist.ac.uk/kd/ode/3x/packages/unix/ode.m

http://archives.math.utk.edu/topics/ordinaryDiffEq.html

You can also just search (on Google, for instance) for "series solution
differential equation mathematica"

j


> I'm having problems finding how to force a series conversion in Dsolve
> in mathematica.
> Could you send to me that line again
>
> Dsolve[ equasion , y , x, Series -> Something. ]
>
> Whats the something.
>
> Thanks
>
> that person