Office Hours : MWF period 8, and by appointment made 24 hours in advance. The purpose of office hours is to provide additional assistance in understanding the material given in lectures and the homework. They are not meant to help you to learn material from lectures that you chose to miss.

Note on Email: I often check my email just in the early afternoons on weekdays. So if you need a reply by a certain time, plan ahead accordingly.

Text: Fundamentals of Differential Equations and Boundary Value Problems by Nagle, Saff, and Snider, 6th edition.

Prerequisites: The calculus sequence. This means that you not only have taken the courses, but can easily do basic calculus such as all standard integrals, derivatives, basic trigonometric identities, methods of integration (substitution, parts, trig identitiesm etc), how to find maximums of functions, graph functions, etc.

Brief Course Description: This course introduces ordinary differential equations, which are used to describe the evolution and behavior of physical processes in most fields of scientific study, from physics and engineering to economics and sociology. The course will teach you how to solve large classes of ordinary differential equations either explicitly or implicitly, including linear ordinary differential equations of arbitrary order (with constant coefficients), most nonlinear equations of first order, and some special classes of nonlinear second-order equations. Methods of solution include integrating factors, the method of undetermined coefficients, the method of variation of parameters, and the method of Laplace transforms.

Class Attendance and Protocol: Most students benefit a great deal from attending class regularly. Arriving late and/or leaving early, reading the newspaper, talking, texting, etc. disrupts the class and is rude and unprofessional. As far as I know it is impossible to take math notes on a laptop, so please don't open yours in class. You are responsible for all information given in class and posted on the course websites, for example, changes to the exam schedule, etc.

Course Format: Lectures Monday and Wednesday; lecture, problem discussion on Friday followed by a quiz. There may be deviations from this schedule because of holidays, exams, etc. Note that this is a 3 credit course so unlike Calculus it meets just 3 times a week. This means that a greater percentage of the time has to be spent covering new material than in a Calculus course.

Exams: There will be three 50-minute in-class exams on Friday, February 17, Friday, March 23, and Friday, April 20. The time and date of the final exam is set by the University to avoid conflicts and cannot be changed. The final exam will cover the entire course and will take place on Friday, May 4 from 12:30-2:30 in the regular classroom unless announced otherwise in class. You must attend the exam at this time, there will be no other final exam offered, so plan on it! No calculators, notes or books are allowed during exams.

Homework and Quizzes: The homework assignments are posted on the class Homework Webpage. It will not be collected. It is very important that you keep up to date and do all the assigned homework problems, even though they will not be collected for grading. We will not be using the on-line homework system WebAssign in this course. The quizzes on Friday will consist of average difficulty homework problems with the numbers changed.

Quizzes: With a few exceptions for holidays, etc, there will be a quiz on every Friday, as well as on the last day of classes, yielding about 12 quizzes for the semester. The two lowest quiz grades will be dropped. There are no make ups on quizzes. A missed quiz gets a zero. If you miss three quizzes, and you have documentation for all three, you can make up one quiz, etc.

Grades: The grades will be computed based on 15% for the quizzes (the two lowest quiz grades will be dropped), 20% for each hour exam, and 25% for the final exam. The grading scale is approximately A: 90-100, B: 80-90, C: 70-80, D: 60-70, E: 0-60, with plusses and minuses at the extremes. Any discussion about your grade on a quiz or exam must take place within one week of the date they were returned in class.

Grades on E-Learning: All grades will be posted on e-learning/Sakai. Students are cautioned that course percentages on e-learning are not computed using the course percentages and so may not reflect your proper course grade. I would turn them off if I could.

Excused Absences: In certain circumstances a student will be able to make up a missed exam. These circumstances could include medical situations, family emergencies, travel for University activities (eg. band, debating club, etc), and religious observances. In these cases the student must inform me before or within one week after the missed work and provide written documentation.

Honor Code: On all work submitted for credit by students at the university, the following pledge is either required or implied:

On my honor, I have neither given nor received unauthorized aid in doing this assignment.

For more information on the student honor code see the Dean of Students Website.

Accommodations for Students with Disabilities: The University Policy: "Students requesting classroom accommodation must first register with the Dean of Students Office. The Dean of Students Office will provide documentation to the student who must then provide this documentation to the Instructor when requesting accommodation."