On the infinitesimal limits of the Schur complements of tridiagonal matrices (Q649565)

The authors prove that is possible for certain matrices to have Schur complements that exhibit a limiting behavior as the sizes of discretizations go to zero. They consider diagonally dominant tridiagonal matrices whose diagonals come from smooth functions. They show that Schur complements or pivots that arise from Gaussian elimination of these matrices can be given as point-wise limits on a grid as the matrices grow in size to infinity. Numerical examples are given to support the conclusions.