On the fast solution of a linear system arising in numerical conformal mapping (Q1820893)

The boundary correspondence function \(\theta\) (\(\phi)\) of the conformal map f of the unit disk onto the interior of a starlike Jordan curve \(\rho (\tau)e^{i\tau}\) \((0\leq \tau <2\pi)\) satisfies Theodorsen's integral equation. Its classical discretisation yields the nonlinear system \(x=a+W \log \rho (x)\) for \(x\in {\mathbb{R}}^{2N}\), where \(a:=(k\pi /N)_{k=0}^{2N-1}\), W is Wittich's matrix, and x is an approximation of \(\theta\) (a). If \(\rho \in W^{2,\infty}\), and \(\| \rho '/\rho \|_{L^{\infty}}<1\), Newton's method applied to this discretised Theodorsen equation is known to converge locally quadratically. By ingenious algebraic manipulations the author is able to solve the linear system for the corrections at the costs of altogether essentially two complex and one real FFT of length 2N, two multiplications by a complex Toeplitz matrix of order N and the solution of three linear systems with such a matrix.