This book is intended to be an introduction to delay differential equations for upperlevel
undergraduates or beginning graduate mathematics students who have a reasonable
background in ordinary differential equations and who would like to get to
the applications quickly. I used a preliminary version of this manuscript in teaching
such a course at Arizona State University over the past two years. Existing texts on
the subject by Diekmann et al. [26] and by Hale and Lunel [41], while excellent on
the theory, are heavy on functional analytic background and light on applications.
In my experience, most graduate students do not have the requisite background to
read such texts profitably. A more applications oriented text by Kuang [48] is, unfortunately,
out of print