[giardini]

"He looked at me with a straight face and said: "There are no engineering applications of differential equations."

This made me laugh; I think he wanted you to laugh too.

Some DE courses could be better described as _histories_ of the applications of mathematics. Consequently they appear to be little more than a patchwork of tricks and hints. My DE professor, as adept with applications as theory, weaved this patchwork together quite skillfully and held our interest.

BTW his DE skills paid his bills extremely well (oil companies have lots of DEs to solve), while the university position allowed time for theory and was frosting on the cake.