For the past decade and more, all students in electrical and computer engineering at the University of Michigan have been required to take a course concerned with the mathematical methods for the solution of linear-systems problems. The course is typically taken in the junior year after completion of a basic four-semester mathematics sequence covering analytic geometry, matrices and determinants, differential and integral calculus, elementary differential equations, and so forth. Because it is the last course in mathematics that all must take for a bachelor's degree, a number of topics are included in addition to those customary in an introductory systems course, for example, functions of a complex variable with particular reference to integration in the complex plane, and Fourier series and transforms.

Some of the courses that make use of this material can be taken concurrently thereby constraining the order in which the topics are covered. It is, for example, necessary that Laplace transforms be introduced early and the treatment carried to such a stage that the student is able to use the transform to solve initial-value problems. Fourier series must also be covered in the first half of the course, and the net result is an ordering that is different from the mathematically natural one, but that is quite advantageous in practice. Thus, the relatively simple material dealing with the Laplace transform and its applications comes at the beginning and provides the student with a sense of achievement prior to the introduction of the more abstract material on functions of a complex variable.