Algebraic spectral multigrid methods (Q1175228)

The solution of Helmholtz's equation on a unit square is considered. Many spectral methods lead to linear systems of equations which are much more ill-conditioned than that of a finite difference method with the same number of degrees of freedom. In this paper, a special basis of Jacobi polynomials is chosen and the resulting matrix becomes better conditioned and has a sparsity similar to that of a finite difference scheme. Multigrid methods for this problem are also explored.