Numerical Analysis

It is an incontestable fact that numerical analysis techniques are used rou­ tinely (although not always effectively) in virtually every quantitative field of scientific endeavor. In this book, which is directed toward upper-division and graduate level students in engineering and mathematics, we have selected for discussion subjects that are traditionally found in numerical analysis texts. But our choice of methodology rejects the traditional where analysis and experience clearly warrant such a departure, and one of our primary aspirations in this work is to equip the reader with the wherewithal to apply numerical analysis thinking to nontraditional subjects. For there is a plethora of computer-oriented sciences such as optimization, statistics, and system analysis and identification that are sorely in need of methods comparable to those related here for classical numerical analysis problems. Toward uncovering for the reader the structure of numerical methods we have, for example, devoted a chapter to a metric space theory for iter­ ative application of operators. In this chapter, we have collected those definitions and concepts of real and functional analysis that are requisite to a modern intermediate-level exposition of the principles of numerical anal­ ysis. Further, we derive the abstract theory (most notably, the contraction mapping theorem) for iteration processes.

This Special Issue focuses mainly on techniques and the relative formalism typical of numerical methods and therefore of numerical analysis, more generally. These fields of study of mathematics represent an important field of investigation both in the field of applied mathematics and even more exquisitely in the pure research of the theory of approximation and the study of polynomial relations as well as in the analysis of the solutions of the differential equations both ordinary and partial derivatives.

The present book contains the 20 articles accepted and published in the Special Issue "Computational Methods and Applications for Numerical Analysis" of the MDPI "Mathematics" journal, which surround the theory, algorithms, programming, software, numerical simulation, and/or novel applications of computational methods to solve problems in engineering, science, and other disciplines related to computations. These topics include finite element methods, finite difference methods, meshless/meshfree methods, physics-informed neural networks, interpolation, approximation, optimization, numerical methods for ordinary/partial differential equations, etc. Their applications include crack propagation, acoustic analysis, elastodynamic analysis, free vibration analysis, structure and topology optimization, fractional equations, eigenvalue problems, inverse problems, etc.