Martin Stynes

The analysis of singular perturbed di?erential equations began early in the twentieth century, when approximate solutions were constructed from asy- totic expansions. (Preliminary attempts appear in the nineteenth century - see[vD94].)Thistechniquehas?ourishedsincethemid-1960sanditsprincipal ideas and methods are described in several textbooks; nevertheless, asy- totic expansions may be impossible to construct or may fail to simplify the given problem and then numerical approximations are often the only option. Thesystematicstudyofnumericalmethodsforsingularperturbationpr- lems started somewhat later - in the 1970s. From this time onwards the - search frontier has steadily expanded, but the exposition of new developments in the analysis of these numerical methods has not received its due attention. The ?rst textbook that concentrated on this analysis was [DMS80], which collected various results for ordinary di?erential equations. But after 1980 no further textbook appeared until 1996, when three books were published: Miller et al. [MOS96], which specializes in upwind ?nite di?erence methods on Shishkin meshes, Morton's book [Mor96], which is a general introduction to numerical methods for convection-di? usion problems with an emphasis on the cell-vertex ?nite volume method, and [RST96], the ?rst edition of the present book. Nevertheless many methods and techniques that are important today, especially for partial di?erential equations, were developed after 1996.

The analysis of singular perturbed di?erential equations began early in the twentieth century, when approximate solutions were constructed from asy- totic expansions. (Preliminary attempts appear in the nineteenth century - see[vD94].)Thistechniquehas?ourishedsincethemid-1960sanditsprincipal ideas and methods are described in several textbooks; nevertheless, asy- totic expansions may be impossible to construct or may fail to simplify the given problem and then numerical approximations are often the only option. Thesystematicstudyofnumericalmethodsforsingularperturbationpr- lems started somewhat later - in the 1970s. From this time onwards the - search frontier has steadily expanded, but the exposition of new developments in the analysis of these numerical methods has not received its due attention. The ?rst textbook that concentrated on this analysis was [DMS80], which collected various results for ordinary di?erential equations. But after 1980 no further textbook appeared until 1996, when three books were published: Miller et al. [MOS96], which specializes in upwind ?nite di?erence methods on Shishkin meshes, Morton's book [Mor96], which is a general introduction to numerical methods for convection-di? usion problems with an emphasis on the cell-vertex ?nite volume method, and [RST96], the ?rst edition of the present book. Nevertheless many methods and techniques that are important today, especially for partial di?erential equations, were developed after 1996.

Many well-known models in the natural sciences and engineering, and today even in economics, depend on partial di?erential equations. Thus the e?cient numerical solution of such equations plays an ever-increasing role in state-- the-art technology. This demand and the computational power available from current computer hardware have together stimulated the rapid development of numerical methods for partial di?erential equations—a development that encompasses convergence analyses and implementational aspects of software packages. In 1988 we started work on the ?rst German edition of our book, which appeared in 1992. Our aim was to give students a textbook that contained the basic concepts and ideas behind most numerical methods for partial di?er- tial equations. The success of this ?rst edition and the second edition in 1994 encouraged us, ten years later, to write an almost completely new version, taking into account comments from colleagues and students and drawing on the enormous progress made in the numerical analysis of partial di?erential equations in recent times. The present English version slightly improves the third German edition of 2005: we have corrected some minor errors and added additional material and references.