## Month: May, 2013

### Where have all the functional equations gone (part II)

I’ll start off exactly where I stopped in the previous post: I will tell you my solution to the problem my PDEs lecturer (and later master’s thesis advisor) Paneah gave us:

Problem: Find all continuously differentiable solutions to the following functional equation:

(FE) $f(t) = f\left(\frac{t+1}{2} \right) + f \left(\frac{t-1}{2} \right) \,\, , \,\, t \in [-1,1] .$

Before writing a solution, let me say that I think it is a fun exercise for undergraduate students, and only calculus is required for solving it, so if you want to try it now is your chance.

### Where have all the functional equations gone (part I)

My first encounter with research mathematics was in the last term of my undergraduate studies (spring 2003). My professor in the course “Introduction to Partial Differential Equations”, Prof. Boris Paneah, thought that it is pointless to give standard homework problems to students of pure mathematics, and instead he gave us several problems which were either extremely challenging, related to his research or related to advanced courses that he was going to give. This was a thrilling experience for me, and is one of the reasons why I decided not long after to do my master’s thesis under his supervision, since no other faculty member came even close to engaging us like Paneah (another reason was that the lectures themselves were fantastic). For example he suggested that we explore the ultrahyperbolic equation

$u_{tt} + u_{ss} - u_{xx} - u_{yy} = 0 ,$    in     $\mathbb{R}^4$,

or that we try to prove the existence of solutions to the two dimensional heat equation in a non-rectangular bounded region of the plane. I remember spending hours on the heat equation, unsuccessfully of course (if I was successful I would have probably become a PDE person). Especially memorable is the one time that he ended a lecture with the following three problems, which were, as you may guess, quite unrelated to the content of the lecture: Read the rest of this entry »