Incremental unknowns for solving partial differential equations (Q749174)

Incremental unknowns were introduced as a means to approximate fractal attractors by using finite differences. In the case of linear elliptic problems, the utilization of incremental unknowns provides a new way for solving such problems using several levels of discretization; the method is similar but different from the classical multigrid methods. In this article we describe the utilization of incremental unknowns for solving a Laplace operator in dimensions one and two. We provide some theoretical results concerning two-level approximations, and we present the numerical tests done with the multi-level approximations. The tests show that for this problem, the conjugate gradient method in conjunction with the incremental unknowns provides a method which has the efficiency comparable to the V-cycle multigrid method.