Mathematics & Science Learning Center
Computer Laboratory

Final Note: At this point we've pretty much completed our exploration of Mathematica's standard solver routines. (Though we still haven't tried out genuine systems of differential equations—those come much later.) It must be emphasized that the differential equation solver in Mathematica is not the best one available. There are dedicated differential equation solvers that can do a better job (i.e. they can solve some of those problems where Mathematica just draws a blank.) Remember, Mathematica is designed to be an all-purpose system—it can do an enormous variety of mathematics. Necessarily its ability in certain specialized applications can be a bit stunted in comparison to a stand-alone program. However, one of Mathematica's other features is its extensibility, i.e. it is programmable—new features can be added to it by the user. These are called packages, and if we get time we'll eventually look at some Mathematica packages written specifically for solving some of the types of differential equations that the built in solver cannot do.

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