okay sci real question here
I admit my situation is strange but I have a BS in math without ever taking differential equations since I substituted that with automata theory and numerical linear algebra
thing is - I don't understand wtf is the point of differential equations
I'm looking at the introduction and table of contents and it seems like most of these books focus on methods for solving equations instead of actually explaining why they're a problem in the first place
it seems VERY similar to calculating likelihood of multidimensional datasets and joint probability distributions and so on
Is most of this shit even relevant with modern numerical methods? I keep hearing it's basically intractable to analytically solve most differential equations past some order