Solution

ID: past-exam-of-the-mathematics-course-of-the-university-of-cambridge/2009/iii/paper-72/5/b/solution

For a sufficiently smooth function, Taylor expansion of the four neighboring values gives
The reaction term is sampled exactly at the grid point. On an exact solution, therefore,
The method has second-order local accuracy for the partial differential equation. The original printed equations multiply this expression by , so their unscaled residual is ; that scaling does not make the Laplacian approximation fourth order. Resonance and inverse-matrix bounds are separate issues from this local truncation calculation.

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