A fast sparse spectral method for nonlinear integro-differential Volterra equations with general kernels

Abstract

We present a sparse spectral method for nonlinear integro-differential Volterra equations based on the Volterra operator’s banded sparsity structure when acting on specific Jacobi polynomial bases. The method is not restricted to convolution-type kernels of the form K(x, y) = K(x − y) but instead works for general kernels at competitive speeds and with exponential convergence. We provide various numerical experiments based on an open-source implementation for problems with and without known analytic solutions and comparisons with other methods.