| Abstract: | The Dirichlet and Neumann problems for the Laplacian are reformulated in the usual way as boundary integral equations of the first kind with symmetric kernels. These integral equations are solved using Galerkin's method with piecewise-constant and piecewise-linear boundary elements, respectively. In both cases, the stiffness matrix is symmetric and positive-definite, and has a condition number of order N, the number of degrees of freedom. By contrast, the condition number of the product of the two stiffness matrices is bounded independently of N. Hence, we can use the Neumann stiffness matrix to precondition the Dirichlet stiffness matrix, and vice versa. © 1997 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. |
