The Complexity of Two-Point Boundary-Value Problems with Piecewise Analytic Data

Abstract

Previous work on the ϵ-complexity of elliptic boundary-value problems Lu = f assumed that the class F of problem elements f was the unit ball of a Sobolev space. In a recent paper, we considered the case of a model two-point boundary-value problem, with F being a class of analytic functions. In this paper, we ask what happens if F is a class of piecewise analytic functions. We find that the complexity depends strongly on how much a priori information we have about the breakpoints. If the location of the breakpoints is known, then the ϵ-complexity is proportional to ln (ϵ−1), and there is a finite element p-method (in the sense of Babuška) whose cost is optimal to within a constant factor. If we know neither the location nor the number of breakpoints, then the problem is unsolvable for ϵ < √2. If we know only that there are b ≥ 2 breakpoints, but we de not know their location, then the ϵ-complexity is proportional to bϵ−1, and a finite element h-method is nearly optimal. In short, knowing the location of the breakpoints is as good as knowing that the problem elements are analytic, whereas only knowing the number of breakpoints is no better than knowing that the problem elements have a bounded derivative in the L2 sense.