Solution

ID: past-exam-of-the-mathematics-course-of-the-year-1-of-the-natural-sciences-course-of-the-university-of-cambridge/2016/paper-2/20/b/solution

Use separation of variables, , and set
For , with , the separated solutions are
For , they are
For , they are
Arbitrary admissible superpositions of separated solutions are again solutions. An individual product is only a separated family, not the entire general solution. Without prescribed boundaries, the general twice-differentiable solution is equivalently D'Alembert's formula,
For example, changing to , makes the differential equation , whose two integrations give this form.

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