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Numerical instability

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This is an old revision of this page, as edited by Alapidus (talk | contribs) at 22:10, 21 September 2005. The present address (URL) is a permanent link to this revision, which may differ significantly from the current revision.

This article deals with an unexpected phenomenon, whose provenence is very obscure, which arises from the numerical solution of differential equations - that of Numerical Instability. The usual notion of instability includes concepts such as fickleness, unreliability, and oversensitivity. If a computation is numerically unstable it gives inaccurate results. A major source of numerical instability results from the cumulative effect of small errors on the numerical results.

More will appear in this article in the following days 09/21/05