32,830 research outputs found
On the numerical calculation of the roots of special functions satisfying second order ordinary differential equations
We describe a method for calculating the roots of special functions
satisfying second order linear ordinary differential equations. It exploits the
recent observation that the solutions of a large class of such equations can be
represented via nonoscillatory phase functions, even in the high-frequency
regime. Our algorithm achieves near machine precision accuracy and the time
required to compute one root of a solution is independent of the frequency of
oscillations of that solution. Moreover, despite its great generality, our
approach is competitive with specialized, state-of-the-art methods for the
construction of Gaussian quadrature rules of large orders when it used in such
a capacity. The performance of the scheme is illustrated with several numerical
experiments and a Fortran implementation of our algorithm is available at the
author's website
An algorithm for the rapid numerical evaluation of Bessel functions of real orders and arguments
We describe a method for the rapid numerical evaluation of the Bessel
functions of the first and second kinds of nonnegative real orders and positive
arguments. Our algorithm makes use of the well-known observation that although
the Bessel functions themselves are expensive to represent via piecewise
polynomial expansions, the logarithms of certain solutions of Bessel's equation
are not. We exploit this observation by numerically precomputing the logarithms
of carefully chosen Bessel functions and representing them with piecewise
bivariate Chebyshev expansions. Our scheme is able to evaluate Bessel functions
of orders between and 1\sep,000\sep,000\sep,000 at essentially any
positive real argument. In that regime, it is competitive with existing methods
for the rapid evaluation of Bessel functions and has several advantages over
them. First, our approach is quite general and can be readily applied to many
other special functions which satisfy second order ordinary differential
equations. Second, by calculating the logarithms of the Bessel functions rather
than the Bessel functions themselves, we avoid many issues which arise from
numerical overflow and underflow. Third, in the oscillatory regime, our
algorithm calculates the values of a nonoscillatory phase function for Bessel's
differential equation and its derivative. These quantities are useful for
computing the zeros of Bessel functions, as well as for rapidly applying the
Fourier-Bessel transform. The results of extensive numerical experiments
demonstrating the efficacy of our algorithm are presented. A Fortran package
which includes our code for evaluating the Bessel functions as well as our code
for all of the numerical experiments described here is publically available
Fermi, Majorana and the statistical model of atoms
We give an account of the appearance and first developments of the
statistical model of atoms proposed by Thomas and Fermi, focusing on the main
results achieved by Fermi and his group in Rome. Particular attention is
addressed to the unknown contribution to this subject by Majorana, anticipating
some important results reached later by leading physicists.Comment: Latex, 16 pages, 2 figure
A fast and well-conditioned spectral method for singular integral equations
We develop a spectral method for solving univariate singular integral
equations over unions of intervals by utilizing Chebyshev and ultraspherical
polynomials to reformulate the equations as almost-banded infinite-dimensional
systems. This is accomplished by utilizing low rank approximations for sparse
representations of the bivariate kernels. The resulting system can be solved in
operations using an adaptive QR factorization, where is
the bandwidth and is the optimal number of unknowns needed to resolve the
true solution. The complexity is reduced to operations by
pre-caching the QR factorization when the same operator is used for multiple
right-hand sides. Stability is proved by showing that the resulting linear
operator can be diagonally preconditioned to be a compact perturbation of the
identity. Applications considered include the Faraday cage, and acoustic
scattering for the Helmholtz and gravity Helmholtz equations, including
spectrally accurate numerical evaluation of the far- and near-field solution.
The Julia software package SingularIntegralEquations.jl implements our method
with a convenient, user-friendly interface
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