I'm currently a 4th year student at a university. I've become close with a professor and we talked about the topic of lie groups in differential equations. He then offered to do a reading course with me, after he sent me a few papers about the topic of lie group analysis in epidemic models.
Since it has been approved I got cold feet. In all honesty, my experience in analysis is not very good. I have only taken a 200-level Analysis course with Steven Lay's book and barely got through.
The textbook we are using is Applications of Lie Groups to Differential Equations by Peter J Olver. The textbook says they only assume an elementary understanding of analysis. I have taken a lot of algebra (rings, fields, groups, galois theory) and have done much better in those classes. I'm not entirely worried about the groups/algebra part. I did go over some of the theorems Olver stated we should know in the opening and I understood the statements and proofs quite easily.
Anyway, my question is how should I prepare for this course? Is there a sort of textbook which will go over preliminaries to this textbook? Is there other more applied/easier textbooks to go along with this textbook?
Best Answer
That be a tough book, friend. I'd recommend going straight at it, but if you really start getting slayed, start off with Symmetry Methods for Differential Equations.