Consider the differential equation
with initial conditions when
. Assume this differential equation has a power-series solution and compute the first four nonzero terms of the expansion.
Let
be the power-series solution of the differential equation. Then we must have
From the initial conditions we know . Then, equating like powers of
we can solve for the first four nonzero terms in the power series expansion:
(Note: I think the solution in the back of Apostol is wrong on this. Apostol has ,
, and
. I’m going to mark this as errata until someone convinces me Apostol is actually correct.)
Therefore, we have
I also got a11=7/8800 (as in the book), and the rest is like in the solution here.