Sunday, October 25, 2015

Solving a differential equation with a complex number as a coefficient

I am trying to solve the following differential equation;
y
By following the usual method of solving, I get my characteristic equation \lambda^{2} - i = 0, which then gives me the general solution of
\begin{equation} y = cos(\sqrt{i}x) + sin(\sqrt{i}x) \end{equation}
I want to know if there is any way I can remove the i term from inside the brackets as to get real solutions. I have tried using an expression for e^{ix} but cannot cancel out the i and the \sqrt{i}



I also tried this with a similar ODE, as shown below,
\begin{equation} y'' + iy = 0 \end{equation}
Where I got a characteristic equation of \lambda^{2} + i = 0, giving me a general solution of
\begin{equation} y=e^{i\sqrt{i}x} + e^{-i\sqrt{i}x} \end{equation}
However, I am still not sure how to cancel this out so that in cos/sin form I have no complex term inside the brackets.



Boundary conditions do not affect the problem at this stage - I'm simply interested in removing the complex term from the brackets.



I hope this is clear enough - any help would be appreciated.

No comments:

Post a Comment

analysis - Injection, making bijection

I have injection f \colon A \rightarrow B and I want to get bijection. Can I just resting codomain to f(A)? I know that every function i...