Ordinary Integral Equations

Abstract

The Boundary Element Method is a general numerical technique which solves boundary integral equations. To understand fully the complexity of these equations it is first necessary to become familiar with simple integral equations, such as those which model one dimensional problems. This chapter introduces such simple integral equations which will be termed ordinary integral equations because of their equivalence with ordinary differential equations which is shown later in the chapter. Illustrations are given of the one-dimensional problems to which they apply. Before proceeding to show how integral equations can be analytically and numerically solved it will be shown that ordinary integral and ordinary differential equations are equivalent.