Solution

ID: past-exam-of-the-mathematics-course-of-the-university-of-cambridge/2023/iii/paper-341/3/a/solution

Let . A one-dimensional Taylor expansion gives
Adding the three coordinate directions shows that the exact solution has stencil defect
This is the local defect of the seven-point Dirichlet Laplacian. Its inverse has max-norm size : this follows from the discrete maximum principle, for example by comparison with the grid restriction of , whose stencil is . Therefore the grid error is .
The question writes this error as , so
In the more usual terminology, the finite difference method is second-order accurate.

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