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Learner Reviews & Feedback for Differential Equations for Engineers by The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology

4.9
stars
2,027 ratings

About the Course

This course is all about differential equations and covers both theory and applications. In the first five weeks, students will learn about ordinary differential equations, while the sixth week is an introduction to partial differential equations. The course includes 56 concise lecture videos, with a few problems to solve after each lecture. After each major topic, there is a short practice quiz. At the end of each week, there is an assessed quiz. Solutions to the problems and practice quizzes can be found in the instructor-provided lecture notes. Download the lecture notes from the link https://www.math.hkust.edu.hk/~machas/differential-equations-for-engineers.pdf Watch the promotional video from the link https://youtu.be/eSty7oo09ZI...

Top reviews

YY

Aug 5, 2020

The course materials are well prepared and organised. The teaching style is approachable and clear. I have learned a lot from this course. Thank you so much, and wish you all the best Prof. Chasnov!

AA

Feb 6, 2020

Very good course if you want to start using differential equations without any rigorous details. Thanks to professor`s explanation everything is very clear. Good basis to continue to dive deeper.

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26 - 50 of 570 Reviews for Differential Equations for Engineers

By Иващенко О

Dec 13, 2020

Must have for STEM graduate ;)

By Michał K

Nov 29, 2019

Def not enough explanations, sometimes really hard to follow what the professor is doing if you do not have lots of Calculus background as professor skipped huge amounts of calculations as he can do it in his head. Towards the end of the course I was doing more educated guessing and understanding kinda what is happening than actually being able to do it myself as opposed to the beginning of the course!

By Laurence G

Sep 16, 2021

Excellent course. Highly recommended to do Khan Academy covering trig and integral calculus first. If you have covered complex numbers and matrix algebra before then the refresher videos in the course were enough. Superposition of complex roots was very confusing and not done in enough detail - pull it apart yourself to see how the cos and sin parts come out of the ansatz and end up being equal to the real and imaginary parts of the positive complex number, which contain information from the both the complex number and its conjugate due to the nature of complex numbers. Some of the practice quizzes require fairly big jumps, so don't be afraid to look at the answers once you give it a shot first. Ignore the "this week takes 1 hour", coursera is so far off the mark here once you factor in doing quizzes and understanding some of the more esoteric material.

By stephane g

Jan 20, 2023

The lectures are very good, and so are the class notes. I found that writing my own notes on the side helped keep the key facts together as a cheat sheet for quizzes (for my purposes, I do not need to know the material by heart). A small criticism is that the feedback on the quizzes could be more helpful: sometimes, we get lucky with an educated guess, but the only feedback we get is "correct"; I have followed a class in which correct responses were explained, which helps! Also, the feedback regarding bad answers is minimal and not always helpful. Aside from these two minor aspects regarding quiz feedback, the logical progression throughout the course is quite smooth, and refreshers are included as extra videos for material relied upon during a chapter (e.g. a refresher lecture on matrix calculus, another on partial derivatives, etc.).

By Tianlu W

Jan 20, 2022

My quiz scores started with three full marks in a row, decayed gradually, and ended with just scraping through the pass line. hahaha. Professor Chesnov is definitely very detailed with the lectures and all the interesting yet troublesome "chores". I would rate highly of this course and recommend this course to any fellow students who want to have a touch in the field of differential equations. All the fascinating facts about how the equations could be brought to life in the physics world and in reality is definitely a plus. Hope to be in other courses taught by Professor Chesnov. Besk luck from home and, hopefully, away from COVID. PS: the final chapter about pdes and fourier series is absolutely the most challenging part. I had some trouble following up with all the formulas, applications, and calculations.

By Christophe V

Mar 17, 2024

Wow. I can't believe I have learned that much math in such a short time : First order ODEs, second order homogeneous and inhomogeneous ODEs, Laplace Transforms, Fourier series, the diffusion PDE, and so much more. The content of this course was overwhelming at times, but thanks to the excellent teaching of Professor Chasnov, I eventually managed to get through it. The PDF lecture notes are very helpful and well-written. I asked a couple of questions on the discussion forum, which were answered very quickly by the professor himself. The field of differential equations is vast, but I think that this course gave me all the basic knowledge I needed. It also gave me confidence to go keep on learning. Thanks so much (again!) to Professor Chasnov.

By Zhiwei H

Dec 24, 2019

As a finance student who has basic knowledge of calculus and linear algebras, I really really enjoy the course, it helped me to combine my math knowledge together while obtain a deeper insight into the applications in life. Professor Jeffrey is awesome, really enjoy his teaching, everything is progressive, clear and beautiful. Just one tip: maybe because of my finance background, I found some cases are too engineering for me to follow-up, such as the diffusion function. That said, the quiz is not very challenging and you could still work out even if you're not attending the engineering school. I would highly recommend this course to anyone who wants to study differential equations.

By Piotr C

Feb 21, 2024

This course is really excellent on so many levels. From the content to quality of the supplementary materials (lecture notes) to presentation and video quality. It's by far the most advanced course I took on Coursera and it's on the same level as standard academic courses. I'd add, however, that concepts regarding physics were not covered in a clear way, for instance nondimensionalization. Also, it was more time consuming that it needed to be; if someone followed all the assignments, they ended up doing similar computations over and over again.

By Allaev S

Apr 25, 2021

Great course. I had very serious problems with simple derivative and even limits. I didn't even know simply the derivative of exponential function, but with several courses, including this one, and about 2 months of time I finally understand what is going on and how to use ODEs and PDEs in modelling of physical behavior. Thank you to professor Chasnov for his time. I know that making so good videos is not easy, but he even prepared a book with explanations and answers to check yourself. And everything is free. Appreciate your work very much.

By Zimei X

Feb 14, 2020

This course is an excellent introduction for anyone wants to study Diff Eq. It is clearly elaborated with exact practice problems. All the math techniques you need could be found in the appendix or supplemental videos. This course is highly recommended for any engineering student with a good command of physics as you need to deal with physical problems in the application part, even though Prof has explained it as clearly as possible. (Maybe it is bc I'm an econ student) All in all, I have learned a lot. Thanks Prof Chasnov!

By Peter d B

Jun 16, 2020

Excellent introduction to differential equations (odes and pdes) with modeling applications. The explanations are very clear. The instructional design and the videos are the best I have ever seen, and the coverage of solution techniques is very full (numerical methods will be covered in another course in 2021, Prof Chasnov says.) The quizzes are so well designed that they will actually increase your understanding of the material. Definitely a five-star course and a top instructor. Thank you

By Hariprasad B

Jun 11, 2020

I have gone the matrix algebra course 34 years ago. The level of comfort with the subject now is the best. The professor made both the concepts and the applications really interesting and enjoying. The lecture note and the transcript were very useful. Of course, the time I have placed in practicing the problems made lot of difference to my learning. I wish the foundation I got from this course makes my learning of the follow-on courses comfortable.

By Ben P

Dec 26, 2020

I would like offer my gratitude to Jeff Chasnov for his insightful and clear course material. Not only I have learnt tons but I have also enjoyed working through the exercises. Jeff is an outstanding instructor that can explain highly complex/convoluted problems in very approachable and easy-to-follow fashion.

In general, the course material is self-contained, comprehensive and full of examples. Final words: it is a great course! Go for it!

By Colin Y

Sep 8, 2021

A nice thing to take away from this course is the lecture notes available from the link he posted on the Resources page. I found the notes extremely helpful for this course. I passed the course simply by studying the notes. The notes are very well-organized, beautifully typeset and rich with examples. The instructor also had a complete set of high-quality lecture notes for other mathematics courses, available from the same link. Hats off!

By Emile v M

Nov 1, 2020

This is a thorough course on ODE's and an intro to PDE's. Professor Chasnov explains this very well with just the right amount of information. The practice questions prepare you well for the assessment quizzes. The accompanying PDF is an excellent review of the whole course. This comes in handy when you want to review something from a while ago. I enjoyed it a lot and I am looking forward to a new course from Professor Chasnov.

By Chintan S

Dec 23, 2019

Brilliant course with sufficient problems to practice and learn and very well explained concepts throughout. Especially liked (1) the illustrations in the physical world to show differential equations in action (2) Well organized lecture notes to refer and learn from (3) Professor Chasnov summarizing each lecture video at the end.

Professor Jeff. Chasnov, please make a subsequent course on partial differential equations.

By Sebastian R

Dec 8, 2019

Definitly one of the best courses I've taken so far. The large number of problems was really helping in understanding the material more deeply. After each newly introduced topic there is a short problem to solve, by which one can test his understandig of the topic. Also there are plenty of applications to real world problems and how to model these, by which the Diff Eq. topic is further motivated.

By Debrup S

May 5, 2020

After the completion of this course, my confidence in dealing with differential equations is increase by a lot of steps. Prof. Chasnov has made has made it simple and interesting.

I am feeling really empowered after the completion of this course as an undergraduate student in mechanical engineering. I would recommend this course to everyone who want to have a strong grasp of ODEs and PDEs.

By Andrew D

May 24, 2020

Really enjoyed this course. Jeff's a very clear presenter and the explanations are great. Unlike some other courses, I haven't needed to do so much reading around (although I plan to do some afterwards - Strang's DEs and linear algebra book for a start - I'm doing all this for fun). I'm now signed up Jeff's vector calculus course - really looking forward to this one too.

By Peichen T

Jun 12, 2021

Excellent course. Materials are well organized and professors explain everything clearly. However some of the physical problem might be a bit hard to understand for people without much physics background. Also a small suggession, some of the theories applied in this course do not have proves, might be a good idea to include these proves in supplimental materials.

By Irene A

Jul 1, 2023

I loved being able to go through the videos and relearning differential equations. I was very pleased at how fast Professor Chasnov replied in the discussion forum. I would have liked the solutions in the book to be a bit more "step by step" so I could check where in my process I went wrong whenever I had a doubt. Thank you and see you in the next course!

By Khôi Đ M

Jun 7, 2021

Knowledge about differential equation is always mandatory for anyone who want to become an engineer or a physicians, scientists. In this course, you will see that these equation appears a lot in our daily life. With dedicated videos, after this course, I think you will be well-prepared and have a solid foundation about this problems. So let's try it out!

By Diogo A

Jul 6, 2020

This course gives a pretty good overview of the topics and is very complete. I liked the physical examples motivating the study, and the videos are well interspersed with examples and DIY exercises. I would like to recommend that a few more videos with examples on solving equations, particularly on the topic of Fourier Series, which is very interesting.

By Carlos G G

Sep 17, 2021

Fantástico curso, profesor muy didáctico y contenidos bien planificados. Ejercicios adecuados a los contenidos teóricos. El curso me ha permitido sentar las bases de la resolución de ODEs y comprobar varias de sus aplicaciones. Muy adecuadas también las explicaciones complementarias, fundamentalmente las referentes a series de Laplace y de Fourier.

By MANJUNATHA B J M

May 28, 2020

I am very happy to learnt the course its very beautiful course anybody can understand easily with little bit knowledge of differentiation and integration concept. this type of course help us to gain new knowledge about application in view of engineering course. Thank you very much for giving this course to us and very happy to join few more course.