Title: Exceptional points in two simple textbook examples,
Abstract: We propose to introduce the concept of exceptional points in intermediate
courses on mathematics and classical mechanics by means of simple textbook
examples. The first one is an ordinary second-order differential equation with
constant coefficients. The second one is the well known damped harmonic
oscillator. They enable one to connect the occurrence of linearly dependent
exponential solutions with a defective matrix that cannot be diagonalized but
can be transformed into a Jordan canonical form.