Problems with Ordinary Differential Equation

• downsman

  30 Mar 12, 10:58

  I'm having problems trying to find the general solution of this first degree ODE:

  y' = Mx - Ny^2 + J

  (M, N and J are all constants).

   

  MATLAB gave a very weird and long answer involving Airy functions. I'm not sure whether I did it correctly.

  Any ideas on how to start solving it?

   

• wee_ws

  30 Mar 12, 12:16

  Hi,

    I entered

    y' = x - y^2 + 1

    into WolframAlpha and it returned a solution involving Airy functions too.

  Cheers,
  Wen Shih

• downsman

  30 Mar 12, 14:08

  Originally posted by wee_ws:

  Hi,

    I entered

    y' = x - y^2 + 1

    into WolframAlpha and it returned a solution involving Airy functions too.

  Cheers,
  Wen Shih

  Looks like my MATLAB programming was correct after all.

  y^2 is the spoiler term. Otherwise the ODE would have been easier to solve.

  Looks like I need to make some simplifying assumptions.

  Anyway, thanks for your help in using WolframAlpha.