TITLE: Quasilinear PDE definition?
QUESTION [10 upvotes]: Quasilinear PDE definition?
Here it's written that:

Definition 3: A partial differential equation is said to be
  quasilinear if it is linear with respect to all the highest order
  derivatives of the unknown function.

What does mean to be linear with respect to all the highest order derivatives?
Does it mean that the terms containing the highest order derivatives are linear, but there might be other terms that are nonlinear?

REPLY [3 votes]: To understand the meaning of quasilinear, it is helpful to start with the first-order case.
On reference.wolfram.com, quasilinear is defined as follows:

The PDE is said to be quasilinear if it can be
expressed in the form $$a(x, y, u(x, y)) \frac{\partial u(x,y)}{\partial x}+b(x, y, u(x, y)) \frac{\partial u(x, y)}{\partial y}=c(x, y, u(x, y))$$

where $a, b$ and $c$ can be nonlinear functions.
For higher order equations, we can have nonlinear functions of some of the derivates, so long as they are not the highest order. For example, the following PDE is second order and quasilinear because it is linear it terms of the highest order derivative, $u_{xx}$:
$$ u_{xx} +  u_y^2 = 0.$$
It is not linear, however, because the $u_y^2$ term.