[ODE] Ways to contribute brainpower to ODE? (Higher orderintegrator?)

[Erin Catto]

You can't easily add a higher order integrator to ODE because it works at
the velocity (impulse) level to avoid singularities seen at the acceleration
level. To get to the velocity level ODE has to use an Euler approximation of
the acceleration (v2-v1/dt). This basically precludes other discretizations.

A nice senior project might be to model some systems in ODE and compare the
results with theoretical models (derived via Lagrange's equations, etc).
This will give you a chance to learn ODE and maybe at that point you will
have a fuller understanding of how you might improve it.

Erin