Approximation of differential operators with boundary conditions

Abstract

The use of spectral methods for solution of boundary value problems is very effective but involves great technical difficulties associated with the implementation of the boundary conditions. There exist several methods of such an implementation, but they are either very cumbersome or require a preliminary analysis of the problem and its reduction to an integral form. We propose a universal means of implementation of the boundary conditions for linear differential operators on a finite interval, which is very simple in its realization. The use of the rational arithmetic allows to assess the effectiveness of this method without interference of the round-off errors. We apply this approach for computation of rational approximations for some fundamental constants. We obtained approximations that in a number of cases are better than those that are given by convergents of regular continued fractions of these constants.