A Legendre-Galerkin method for solving general Volterra functional integral equations (Q501979)

This paper investigates the existence, uniqueness, and regularity of the solution of a Volterra functional integral equation in the Hilbert space \(L^2(I)\). Such an equation has the form \[ u(t)+b(t)\varphi(\theta(t))+\int_{0}^{\theta(t)}c(t,s)\varphi(s)ds=f(t), \quad t\in I, \tag{1} \] where \(I=[0,1]\), \(f(t)\in L^2(I)\) is a given function and \(u(t)\in L^2(I)\) is the unknown function to be determined. A fully discrete Legendre-Galerkin method for (1) is proposed. The focus of this paper is the stability analysis of this method. Based on this stability result, the authors prove that the approximation equation has a unique solution, and then show that the Legendre-Galerkin method gives the optimal convergence order \(O(n^{-m})\), where \(m\) denotes the degree of the regularity of the exact solution and \(n+1\) denotes the dimensional number of the approximation space. Some numerical examples confirming the theoretical results are also presented.