What comes after Differential Equations?

First of all, please do excuse the lack of correct terminology, I've haven't learnt Differential Equations at school (yet) so this question comes from just a bit of research I did for my own enjoyment.

I was reading up on differential equations and the first thing I read was that their result is either a function or a family of functions. So I thought, if the result of functions are numbers and the result of eifferential equations are families of functions, is there anything whose results are a family of differential equations?

Since I don't know the terminology of the subject, I don't know what to search on Google to find the answer so I come to you for help. What comes after differential equations?

Thanks a lot

EDIT: I didn't word the question correctly. Sorry about that, I'll try to give an example.
In this normal equation $x^2+2x-3=0$ the solutions are $x_{1}=-3$ and $x_{2}=1$. The solutions are numbers.

In this differential equation $\frac{dx}{dt} = 5x -3$ the solution is $$x(t) = Ce^{5t}+ \frac{3}{5}.$$

The solution is a function/a normal equation.
(Took the example for the differential equation from this page http://mathinsight.org/ordinary_differential_equation_introduction_examples )

What I want to know is if there is a type of equations whose solutions are differential equations.

Solution 1:

I think the answers given here are so busy trying to to tell you how to think about mathematics that they didn't bother to tell you the answer to your question. There is nothing wrong with how you are thinking. After ordinary differential equations there is the calculus of variations. In this subject, you learn (loosely) that to find an extrema of a functional you can take the euler-lagrange operator on the functional and this will yield a set of differential equations. You can then solve these diff eqs to find the equations of motion of your system.

Solution 2:

Mathematics is not a hierarchy of ever more complicated kinds of equations.

Differential equations are important because among other things they have provided a language for physics to discuss many problems and understand the behaviour of their systems. From that point of view, differential equations are nothing but numerical equations that hold at many points.

But mathematics is way way way more than that. It about logical structures (loosely motivated by number systems) and their relations.

To answer your question more specifically as suggested by nayrb, I don't think there is some standard kind of frame where one writes equations of differential equations. Note that the term "equation" implies that you have some object that you do operations with: in your numeric and differential equations, you can add and multiply numbers and functions respectively. To write equations of differential equations, you should define operations between differential equations. I'm not saying it is not possible, but it is hard for me to imagine how to do it.