Uniform l1 behaviour for time discretization of a Volterra equation with completely monotonic kernel: I. stability

This paper is the first of two papers on the time discretizationof the equation u_t + ^t ₀ ß (t — s) Au (s) ds= 0, t > 0, u (0) = u₀, where A is a self-adjoint denselydefined linear operator on a Hilbert space H with a completeeigensystem {_m, _m}_{m = 1}, and ß (t) is completely monotonicand locally integrable, but not constant. The equation is discretizedin time using first-order differences in combination with order-oneconvolution quadrature. The stability properties of the timediscretization are derived in the l¹_t (0, ; H) norm.