- slide 1 of 4 Instead of directly answering the question of "Do
engineers use differential equations?" I would like to take you
through some background first and then see whether differential
equations are used by engineers. Years ago when I was working as
a design engineer for a shock absorber manufacturing company, my
concern was how a hydraulic shock absorber dissipates shocks and
vibrational energy exerted form road fluctuations to the car
suspension system, how shock absorbers behave in the suspension
system, and what are the effects of other elements of this
system like the mass of the components, the spring rate of the
suspension springs and tires, etc. My research led me to a paper
that used a very complicated nonlinear differential equation to
study the functional behavior of hydraulic shock absorbers. Here
I have to mention that in those days library and paper research
was not as easy as today. Computers and the Internet were not as
popular as today, and we had to search through engineering
indexes