Help & FAQ

Short Answer : No.
Long Answer : No.
Long Answer with Explanation : I'm not trying to be a jerk with the previous two answers but the answer really is "No". Here's why.

My first priority is always to help the students who have paid to be in one of my classes here at Lamar University (that is my job after all!). I also have quite a few duties in my department that keep me quite busy at times. All this means that I just don't have a lot of time to be helping random folks who contact me via this website. I would love to be able to help everyone but the reality is that I just don't have the time. So, because I can't help everyone who contacts me for help I don't answer any of the emails asking for help.

When I first started this site I did try to help as many as I could and quickly found that for a small group of people I was becoming a free tutor and was constantly being barraged with questions and requests for help. Unfortunately there were a small number of those as well that were VERY demanding of my time and generally did not understand that I was not going to be available 24 hours/day, 7 days/week for help. I really got tired of dealing with those kinds of people and that was the final straw, so to speak, that made me decide to quit answering any email asking for help.

So, while I'd like to answer all emails for help, I can't and so I'm sorry to say that all emails requesting help will be ignored.

Those are intended for use by instructors to assign for homework problems if they want to. Having solutions (and for many instructors even just having the answers) readily available would defeat the purpose of the problems. Please do not email asking for the solutions/answers as you won't get them from me and I will not even answer those emails.

If you have found a typo or mistake on a page then please contact me and let me know of the typo/mistake. Please be as specific as possible in your report. Let me know what page you are on and just what you feel the typo/mistake is. It's kind of hard to find the potential typo if all you write is "The 2 in problem 1 should be a 3" (and yes I've gotten handful of typo reports like that...).

Simply navigate to the page you want to download as a pdf and under the "Download" menu in the upper right corner you will have a variety of links to download the material. Depending on the topic you will find a pdf download for the full book and possibly for the chapter and/or section you are in (if those downloads exist). The only exception to this are the cheat sheets. To download those go here and there are links for each of them on that page.

At this point I don't anticipate adding any new classes to the content of the site. The notes here encompasses the classes that I typically teach here at Lamar University (with the exception of Algebra which I haven't taught in decades). While I would like to add other classes I just don't have as much time to work on the site as I once did and so what little time that I can squeeze out of my schedule to work on the site tend to go to other things.

Yes!

That is currently top of my list of things to do on the site. However, writing those problems are not as simple as most of the other topics on the site. I can't just write a problem off the top of my head and expect it to just work with little or no modification. In almost every case I need to completely work the problem and then modify it to make it even moderately workable. That just takes time to do and I don't have as much time as I once did to work on the site so it is slowly coming along.

To make it worse I don't intend to actually put any problems online until I can get problems written for the most commonly used chapters in a Differential Equations course. I want to make sure that any instructor using the material can expect there to be problems for the full set of material and given how long it takes to write the problems I can't/won't be able to guarantee just when a particular chapter will get done. Therefore, until I can get First Order, Second Order, Laplace Transforms and Systems of Differential Equations done I won't be putting any practice problems online. I also can't say just when I'll get that done unfortunately.

The mathematics is displayed using MathJax. If you have issues viewing a particular equation please contact me and let me know which equation (and the topic of course....) so I can take a look at it. For most of the mathematics I needed to tweak most of them by hand and it's always possible that I missed one.

The vast majority of the graphs in the site were generated using Mathematica. Those that have equations in them generally had the equations generated via MathType and then added to the images with Photoshop.

Here is a great description of the simplest way to create a citation for a page from any website. Here is the information you'll need for citing pages off this site.

My Name (i.e. author name) : Paul Dawkins

Page Title : Navigate to the page you are citing and hover your mouse over the page tab (generally at the top of your browser) and it should show the full title of the page. Alternatively, the "breadcrumb" at the top of every page (i.e. the stuff in the red oval under the menus) is always in the form "Home / Book Title / Chapter Title (if in a chapter) / Section Title (if in a section)" and you can construct the Page Title from that. For a Book introduction page the Page Title is just the Book Title. For a Chapter introduction page or in the case of many of the Extras the only page in the chapter the Page Title is just Book Title - Chapter Title. Finally, for a Section page the Page Title is Book Title - Section Title.

Website Title : Pauls Online Notes

Sponsoring Institution : Lamar University

Publication Date : Navigate to page you are citing and in the bottom right corner is the date the page was last modified and this can be considered the publication date for that page.

Page Numbers : There are no page numbers for a website and so can be ignored.

Medium : Web

The site search is Custom Search Engine powered by Google. Google is nice enough to provide this service free of charge to accredited Universities and University programs. The search itself is actually done on Google's servers and is not done on the server actually hosting this site. Using the site search feature is identical to using Google to search except it will only search my site.