<story><title>Introduction to Differential Equations (2008)</title><url>http://tutorial.math.lamar.edu/Classes/DE/Definitions.aspx</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>acjohnson55</author><text>DiffEq seemed like black magic to me when I took it as a freshman in college. They basically just taught us the recipe bag for solving equations in different shapes, but very little insight.&lt;p&gt;When I started a gamified music discovery company, I actually ended up using DiffEq to define a scoring algorithm that would produce continuously varying point values based on time series input data. I had to relearn how to do it, but the concepts made far more sense with a real application.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>amelius</author><text>Also, what they usually don&amp;#x27;t tell you is that the recipe bag only works for toy problems. For real applications you most often need numerical approximations.</text></comment>
<story><title>Introduction to Differential Equations (2008)</title><url>http://tutorial.math.lamar.edu/Classes/DE/Definitions.aspx</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>acjohnson55</author><text>DiffEq seemed like black magic to me when I took it as a freshman in college. They basically just taught us the recipe bag for solving equations in different shapes, but very little insight.&lt;p&gt;When I started a gamified music discovery company, I actually ended up using DiffEq to define a scoring algorithm that would produce continuously varying point values based on time series input data. I had to relearn how to do it, but the concepts made far more sense with a real application.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>craig_asp</author><text>Yeah, it&amp;#x27;s relatively dry material which is hard to grasp without the context of why we need it and how it can be applied in the real world. While the intro is good, it still has the same problem - just shows (in a good way) &amp;quot;some math&amp;quot;.</text></comment>