CAAM 336· Differential Equations in Science and Engineering

Spring 2008 · Rice University



In class on Friday (the 22nd of February) I posed a number of questions, saying that knowing the answers to all of these questions is a good start to your review. Those questions were:
  • What is a vector space?
  • What is an inner product?
  • What is a linear operator?
    • What is its nullspace?
    • What is its range?
    • What does it mean to be symmetric?
    • What are its eigenvalues and eigenvectors?
  • What is the projection theorem?
  • What is the spectral theorem?
  • How do you deal with inhomogeneous boundary conditions?
  • What is the weak formulation?
  • What is the Galerkin method?
  • What is the finite element method?