Advanced Engineering Mathematics, 7th Edition

3.6 Cauchy–Euler Equations

INTRODUCTION

The relative ease with which we were able to find explicit solutions of linear higher-order differential equations with constant coefficients in the preceding sections does not, in general, carry over to linear equations with variable coefficients. We shall see in Chapter 5 that when a linear differential equation has variable coefficients, the best that we can usually expect is to find a solution in the form of an infinite series. However, the type of differential equation considered in this section is an exception to this rule; it is an equation with variable coefficients whose general solution can always be expressed in terms of powers of x, sines, cosines, logarithmic, and exponential functions. ...