A preconditioner of a finite-element matrix for a fourth-order elliptic equation (Q1323928)

To solve the system of linear equations arising from the finite element discretization of a fourth-order elliptic equation in an arbitrary, sufficiently smooth plane region with natural boundary condition, the authors present a preconditioner which can reduce the number of arithmetic operations to \(O(h^{-1}\ln h \ln \varepsilon^{-1})\), where \(\varepsilon\) is the relative error in the energy norm. The preconditioning exploits the fictious components method and the fast discrete Fourier transform method. The reviewer found it very difficult to read the paper, partly because the exposition relies on earlier papers. No results of numerical experiments are reported.