Linear Methods of Applied Mathematics
Evans M. Harrell II and James V. Herod*
version of 8 September 1996
The text is intended for a first course on the subject, to be taken by students who have had two years of calculus and an introduction to ordinary differential equations and vector spaces. Actually, there are two variants of the course which are interwoven in the text; they correspond to two different 10-week undergraduate courses at Georgia Tech, in which the text has been used. The course emphasizing the use of Fourier series and orthogonal series, Mathematics 4582 at Georgia Tech, follows the red syllabus with the plan listed below, while the course emphasizing integral operators and the method of Green's functions, Mathematics 4348, follows the green syllabus.
Most of our students are engineers, with a few physicists and mathematics majors. If the students are adequately prepared, they can cover all the material in either track in ten weeks or so. On the other hand, if a substantial amount of review is necessary for linear algebra or ordinary differential equations, then they will need more time, and the course might take an entire semester. A semester-long course for wel