| I've heard of a program that runs on PC's called PHASER for this purpose.
Othewise, there are numerous books on the subject. A well-known text is
Boyce and DePrima but it's a bit cookbookish; I used it in a college
course ages ago. A very nice paperback from MIT Press is a book by
V. Arnold - it emphasises a geometric/qualitative point of view which
is a good complement to something like the first book.
Finally, look at a numerical analysis book on differential equations.
There is one by Dawber (or something like that) which introduces a good
Runge-Kutta program and then gives a series of interesting examples.
I'd have to look at the exact title - it's something like "Computing
Applications to Differential Equations".
This is all assuming you want ordinary differential equations - partial
differential equations are another area. For these physics books are
the best, and also books on finite element modeling.
Oh, another interesting book worth finding is "Differential Equations,
Dynamical Systems, and Linear Algebra" by Hirsh and Smale.
You're best off programming some of your own simple numerical analysis
differential equatins solvers and playing with them to really get
an intuition about it.
- Jim
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