On the convergence of difference schemes for a heat conduction equation

Sufficient conditions are obtained for the convergence of difference schemes for the numerical solution of the Cauchy problem for a heat conduction equation in two space variables. The sufficient conditions are derived in a form similar to those for the convergence of a sequence of linear positive operators in the Korovkin theorem. As an application it is shown that difference schemes that are widely used in practice can easily be checked for convergence by these conditions.