Differential Equations and Linear Algebra (Gilbert Strang)

Really great reference for computer graphics work. Strang books are always on point. This one might be my favorite!

I am a surgeon by profession and have been using this text in my "hobby", a serious self-study of mathematics and modern physics, in conjunction with MIT's Open Courseware and edx.org. I started off with just high school calculus from decades ago, and have made it to the mid-undergraduate maths covered in this volume. Although I'm giving it five stars, I have to add the caveat that at first it was hard to get started with this book. Professor Strang fills the text with all sorts of glimpses of more advanced topics that will be unfamiliar to new students. For example, some of the very first examples involve step and Dirac delta input, with a heavy emphasis on impulse response concepts to explain the time evolution of solutions. This really confused me at first. However, once I started to feel more familiar with ODEs, this presentation was very helpful to get me to "get it" at a deeper level than the mere methodology of finding and writing out solutions.Also, the book does not follow the OCW differential equations course (18.03) very closely, at least the version currently online, even though it supposedly grew out of a rewrite of the 18.03 syllabus. Hopefully MIT will put up an updated version of 18.03 at some point (though I do love Prof. Mattuck's lectures in the current one).I still have a decent chunk of the material ahead of me (matrix methods for ODE systems, eigenvalues, etc.) but I now find the book very easy to follow.

This is a book written by a genius who is also willing to teach. Most math genius don’t have the patience to teach. It’s a piece of art. I worked through every problem in it. The more I read this book, the more I appreciate the effort Gilbert Strang put into teaching.

When Dr. Strang took me into the back and broke my left index finger cause I forgot the domain of arctan, I knew that I was going to be in love forever.

an interesting attempt to put these two topics together

A great undergraduate book, but if you already own Straang's linear algebra text, you'd do better to buy a different diff eq book since there's a few chapters of overlap.

The Best book that i read from an Massachussetts Institute of Technology Mathemathics Professor Expert. Great explanations and MIT difficulty. Great connection because Differential Equations needs linear Algebra . Thats why MIT is no 1Gilbert Strang an MIT Genius .

There are a few strangers that have benefited me in my life. Elizabeth Taylor, Richard Burton, obviously some others, and Dr. Strang. Combine this textbook (and his others) with his lectures available online, and you're hooked up with everything that an independent learner needs.