Mathematics & Science Learning Center
Computer Laboratory

Assuming that you made no mistakes, (and it would be pretty hard to do so given that all you had to do was type seven letters and hit [ENTER]), you should have gotten an output from Mathematica that looked something like the following:

?DSolve

DSolve[eqn,y,x] solves a differential equation for the function y, with independent variable x.
DSolve[{eqn₁,eqn₂,…},{y₁,y₁,…},x] solves a list of differential equations.
DSolve[eqn,y,{x₁,x₂,…}] solves a partial differential equation.  >>

Notice that this description of DSolve tells us that there are actually three ways that the command can be used:

"DSolve[eqn,y,x]" tells us how to solve a single differential equation, whereas "DSolve[{eqn₁,eqn₂,…},{y₁,y₁,…},x]" is the command we'd use to solve a system of differential equations. We haven't even done systems in class yet, so we'll stick to single equations for a while. Finally, the last option, "DSolve[eqn,y,{x₁,x₂,…}]" is intended for use with partial differential equations, which is totally beyond the scope of this course, so we'll ignore this possibility entirely!

Anyway, let's get started on giving DSolve a work-out. We'll see how it handles some basic first-order problems you might encounter on a typical early exam in this course.

So, moving on...

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