Introduction to Differential Equations (2008)
DiffEq seemed like black magic to me when I took it as a freshman in college. They basically just taught us the recipe bag for solving equations in different shapes, but very little insight.<p>When I started a gamified music discovery company, I actually ended up using DiffEq to define a scoring algorithm that would produce continuously varying point values based on time series input data. I had to relearn how to do it, but the concepts made far more sense with a real application.