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How to find second order differential equation from general solution?

asked 4 years ago

Presto.creator gravatar image

I've looked everywhere on Sage but I simply cannot find any command that'll help me with this.

It's essentially using desolve, but backwards, like if I'm given

y=C1*e^-x + C2*x*e^-x

how would I figure out the original second order differential equation? Thanks!

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Welcome to Ask Sage! Thank you for your questions!

slelievre gravatar imageslelievre ( 4 years ago )

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answered 4 years ago

Juanjo gravatar image

You can derive two times the identity y=C1ex+C2xex, take the two derivatives for solving C1 and C2, and then replace these constants in the initial identity, that is:

var("C1, C2")
y = function("y")(x)
f = C1*e^(-x) + C2*x*e^(-x)
sol = solve([diff(y==f,x), diff(y==f,x,2)], C1, C2)
ode = (y-f==0).subs(sol).full_simplify()
show(ode)

The output is

y(x)+2xy(x)+2(x)2y(x)=0

You can prettify it by using, for example, the following code inspired by @slelievre's answer to this question, i.e.:

y1 = function("y1", latex_name="y'")(x)
y2 = function("y2", latex_name="y''")(x)
ode_pretty = ode.subs({diff(y(x), x):y1, diff(y(x), x, x): y2})
show(ode_pretty)

which yields

y(x)+2y(x)+y

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answered 4 years ago

slelievre gravatar image

updated 4 years ago

In this case, the function in the question has two parameters, so it describes a vector space of dimension 2 inside the space of functions from ℝ to ℝ.

So we might look for a linear differential equation of order two.

Then for each of the functions x \mapsto e^{-x} and x \mapsto x e^{-x}, we can look for linear relations between the function, its derivative, and its second derivative.

See Ask Sage question 56390 about that.

Then we can find a common linear dependence relation that works for both.

That will be the desired differential equation.

For another approach, use power series expansions of the functions and the ore-algebra package, see in particular the guessing module.

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I didn't know my questions were so similar, thank you again! You're a good person

Presto.creator gravatar imagePresto.creator ( 4 years ago )

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Asked: 4 years ago

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Last updated: Mar 26 '21