The complexity of numerical methods for elliptic partial differential equations

Abstract

We consider three Ritz-Galerkin procedures with Hermite bicubic, bicubic spline and linear triangular elements for approximating the solution of self-adjoint elliptic partial differential equations and a collocation with Hermite bicubics method for general linear elliptic equations defined on general two dimensional domains with mixed boundary conditions. We systematically evaluate these methods by applying them to a sample set of problems while measuring various performance criteria. The test data suggest that collocation is the most efficient method for general use.