Welcome!
Hello everybody,
Welcome to the Winter 2020's version of MAT311 - Partial Differential Equations! Please take your time to go through the syllabus and published modules to familiarize yourself with the course. We, the instructor (Kasun) and the TA (Ahmed), are here to help you succeed in this course. Please attend the lectures and tutorials regularly, and actively participate in the course by asking and answering questions. Note that lectures start on January 7th and tutorials start on January 15th.
The main goal of the course is to introduce Partial Differential Equations (PDEs) and some of the analytical and numerical tools used for solving them. Since PDEs are extensively used to describe fundamental natural phenomena -- for example, heat propagation (Fourier), electromagnetism (Maxwell), fluid dynamics (Navier-Stokes), relativity (Einstein), quantum mechanics (Schrödinger), superconductivity (Ginzburg–Landau), chemical reactions (Kolmogorov–Petrovsky–Piskounov), neuroscience (FitzHugh–Nagumo), and finance (Black–Scholes) -- we also plan to discuss some applications of PDEs.
I hope that by the end of the course, all of you will understand more about PDEs and will appreciate their usefulness in day to day life.
Good Luck!
"Our understanding of the fundamental processes of the natural world is based to a large extent on partial differential equations." - Walter A. Strauss
