Guaranteed Error Bounds for Ordinary Differential Equations

Abstract

Hamming once said, "The purpose of computing is insight, not numbers." If that is so, then the speed of our computers should be measured in insights per year, not operations per second. One key insight we wish from nearly all computing in engineering and scientific applications is, "How accurate is the answer?" Standard numerical analysis has developed techniques of forward and backward error analysis to help provide this insight, but even the best codes for computing approximate answers can be fooled. In contrast, validated computation ffl checks that the hypotheses of appropriate existence and uniqueness theorems are satisfied, ffl uses interval arithmetic with directed rounding to capture truncation and rounding errors in computation, and ffl organizes the computations to obtain as tight an enclosure of the answer as possible. These notes for a series of lectures at the VI-th SERC Numerical Analysis Summer School, Leicester University, apply the principles of validated computatio..