Essential Mathematical Methods for the Physical Sciences

In this chapter and the next, the solution of differential equations of types typically encountered in the physical sciences and engineering is extended to situations involving more than one independent variable. A partial differential equation (PDE) is an equation relating an unknown function (the dependent variable) of two or more variables to its partial derivatives with respect to those variables. The most commonly occurring independent variables are those describing position and time, and so we will couch our discussion and examples in notation appropriate to them.

As in the rest of this book, we will focus our attention on the equations that arise most often in physical situations. We will restrict our discussion, therefore, to linear PDEs, i.e. those of first degree in the dependent variable. Furthermore, we will discuss primarily second-order equations. The solution of first-order PDEs will necessarily be involved in treating these, and some of the methods discussed can be extended without difficulty to third- and higher-order equations. We shall also see that many ideas developed for ODEs can be carried over directly into the study of PDEs.

Initially, in the current chapter, we will concentrate on general solutions of PDEs in terms of arbitrary functions of particular combinations of the independent variables, and on the solutions that may be derived from them in the presence of boundary conditions. We also discuss the existence and uniqueness of the solutions to PDEs under given boundary conditions.