Mathematical Aspects of Boundary Element Methods

Boundary element methods relate to a wide range of engineering applications, including fluid flow, fracture analysis, geomechanics, elasticity, and heat transfer. Thus, new results in the field hold great importance not only to researchers in mathematics, but to applied mathematicians, physicists, and engineers. A two-day minisymposium Mathematical Aspects of Boundary Element Methods at the IABEM conference in May 1998 brought together top rate researchers from around the world, including Vladimir Maz'ya, to whom the conference was dedicated. Focusing on the mathematical and numerical analysis of boundary integral operators, this volume presents 25 papers contributed to the symposium. Mathematical Aspects of Boundary Element Methods provides up-to-date research results from the point of view of both mathematics and engineering. The authors detail new results, such as on nonsmooth boundaries, and new methods, including domain decomposition and parallelization, preconditioned iterative techniques, multipole expansions, higher order boundary elements, and approximate approximations. Together they illustrate the connections between the modeling of applied problems, the derivation and analysis of corresponding boundary integral equations, and their efficient numerical solutions.