5 ms·

While the linked course seems a lot more thorough, I took the Udacity "Differential Equations in Action" [1] course, which I found very well done. For the home

While the linked course seems a lot more thorough, I took the Udacity "Differential Equations in Action" [1] course, which I found very well done. For the homework you write Python programs to compute things like gravitational slingshots, modeling epidemics, wildfires, and the n-body problem. [1] https://www.udacity.com/course/differential-equations-in-action--cs222 https://www.udacity.com/course/differential-equations-in-act...

sampo 8y ago
While the linked course notes (I looked at the pdf, definitely good textbook quality and not just course notes, really) are absolutely more thorough in the classical undergrad diff.eq. topics, the Udacity course touches some further topics (stiffness, implicit methods, control theory) that the course notes don't.
nraynaud 8y ago
Can we get to the text and videos without all the school-ish crud? (starting a course, timelines etc.)
- gmiller123456 8y ago
  Yes [1]. I haven't taken a Udacity course in quite a while, but at the time all of their videos were hosted on Youtube, so you should be able to find a lot of their courses just on Youtube. For the homework, I remember there was an include file that they didn't provide the source code for, but a Google search turned up a version someone wrote for using it locally. Usually it's pretty obvious when you've solved the problem and have the correct code, but to make absolutely sure, you have to upload your code to their server for verification. But you can take the whole class without ever visiting Udacity. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8cLXVG2Q6D4&list=PLAwxTw4SYaPlT4WYwf_SzNA9FV0qpGE5A https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8cLXVG2Q6D4&list=PLAwxTw4SYa...
  - nraynaud 8y ago
    thanks!
madengr 8y ago
I took the first part of that course, enough to write an n-body game: https://github.com/madengr/nbody https://github.com/madengr/nbody While it was a good course, I wish it covered the analytic portion, rather than dive straight into numerical solutions.
- salty_biscuits 8y ago
  That is pretty neat. Improvements on the analytic side (if you are interested in the opinion of a random person on the internet) would be to scale your coordinate system (e.g. scale the distance and time to make average velocity and radius equal 1) and look into using a symplectic integrator. Better for these types of systems.
  - madengr 8y ago
    Thanks. I remember in the course, keeping the energy constant is the big issue. They used the symplectic integrator to improve it. In the game, if you let it run long enough, the error visibly shows up.

sampo 8y ago

While the linked course notes (I looked at the pdf, definitely good textbook quality and not just course notes, really) are absolutely more thorough in the classical undergrad diff.eq. topics, the Udacity course touches some further topics (stiffness, implicit methods, control theory) that the course notes don't.

nraynaud 8y ago

Can we get to the text and videos without all the school-ish crud? (starting a course, timelines etc.)

gmiller123456 8y ago
Yes [1]. I haven't taken a Udacity course in quite a while, but at the time all of their videos were hosted on Youtube, so you should be able to find a lot of their courses just on Youtube. For the homework, I remember there was an include file that they didn't provide the source code for, but a Google search turned up a version someone wrote for using it locally. Usually it's pretty obvious when you've solved the problem and have the correct code, but to make absolutely sure, you have to upload your code to their server for verification. But you can take the whole class without ever visiting Udacity. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8cLXVG2Q6D4&list=PLAwxTw4SYaPlT4WYwf_SzNA9FV0qpGE5A https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8cLXVG2Q6D4&list=PLAwxTw4SYa...
- nraynaud 8y ago
  thanks!

madengr 8y ago

I took the first part of that course, enough to write an n-body game: https://github.com/madengr/nbody https://github.com/madengr/nbody While it was a good course, I wish it covered the analytic portion, rather than dive straight into numerical solutions.

salty_biscuits 8y ago
That is pretty neat. Improvements on the analytic side (if you are interested in the opinion of a random person on the internet) would be to scale your coordinate system (e.g. scale the distance and time to make average velocity and radius equal 1) and look into using a symplectic integrator. Better for these types of systems.
- madengr 8y ago
  Thanks. I remember in the course, keeping the energy constant is the big issue. They used the symplectic integrator to improve it. In the game, if you let it run long enough, the error visibly shows up.