Analytically Solve this PDE

ordinary differential equationspartial differential equations

Thanks for looking at my question. I'm working through/self-studying the second edition of Partial Differential Equations: An Introduction by Walter A. Strauss.

On page three, example two, he says

"Solve the PDE $u_{xx} + u = 0$. Again, its really an ODE with an extra variable y. We know how to solve the ODE, so the solution is $u = f(y)cos(x) + g(y)sin(x)$, where again $f(y)$ and $g(y)$ are two arbitrary functions of $y$. You can easily check this formula by differentiating twice to verify that $u_{xx} = -u$."

What I don't understand is how he gets $u = f(y)cos(x) + g(y)sin(x)$.

He says it's basically just an ODE with an extra variable y, but I'm not quite seeing that. I was able to understand Example 1 before it and Example 3 after it, and I can sort of see that this PDE is similar to the ODE form $y'' + y = 0$, but it's just been a hot minute since I've solved an ODE like this. I see it's homogenous, and one could use the method of integrating factors for it, but since this is a PDE I'm not sure how to solve this. My initial guess of $C_{1}e^{r_{1}t} + C_{2}e^{{r_2}t}$ didn't work, so I'm not sure how they got what they got for $u$. I get that when you integrate with respect to $x$ the constant you get is a function of $y$, but that's all I understand about this problem. Could someone show me how Walter got his solution for $u$, please? Thanks.

Best Answer

Fix an arbitrary value for $y$, say $y_0$. Then let $f(x) =u(x,y_0)$. You can immediately see that $f''+f=0$. This is very common ODE and most people just know that $\sin$ and $\cos$ are solutions, but if you're unhappy with that you can get there with $\exp(\omega x)$ solutions and some algebra.

Now we know that $f(x) = A \sin(x) + B \cos(x)$ for an arbitrary $y_0$. The only thing that can change when we change $y_0$ are the values of constants $A,B$.

This finally leads to conclusion $u(x,y) = A(y)\sin(x) + B(y)\cos(x)$ and the $A,B$ now functions of $y$ are determined by boundary conditions.

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