Regions of stability,equivalence theorems and the Courant-Friedrichs-Lewy condition

Summary The celebrated CFL condition for discretizations of hyperbolic PDEs is shown to be equivalent to some results of Jeltsch and Nevanlinna concerning regions of stability ofk-step,m-stage linear methods for the integration of ODEs. We characterize the methods for the numerical integration of the model equation,u _t=u _x which are weakly stable when the mesh-ratio takes the maximum value allowed by the CFL condition. We provide new equivalence theorems between stability and convergence, which improve on the classical results.