A Unified Formulation of Analytical and Numerical Methods for Solving Linear Fredholm Integral Equations

Abstract

This article is concerned with the construction of approximate analytic solutions to linear Fredholm integral equations of the second kind with general continuous kernels. A unified treatment of some classes of analytical and numerical classical methods, such as the Direct Computational Method (DCM), the Degenerate Kernel Methods (DKM), the Quadrature Methods (QM) and the Projection Methods (PM), is proposed. The problem is formulated as an abstract equation in a Banach space and a solution formula is derived. Then, several approximating schemes are discussed. In all cases, the method yields an explicit, albeit approximate, solution. Several examples are solved to illustrate the performance of the technique.

Keywords

• Fredholm integral equations
• direct method
• numerical methods
• symbolic computations
• degenerate kernels
• non-separable kernels