↜ Back to index Introduction to Numerical Analysis 1

# Lecture 3

We cover the following topics:

## Fortran function

In Fortran it is possible to define a function, a piece of code that produces a value depending on the inputs. It is analogous to a function in mathematics.

For instance, if we want to define a function $$f(x, t) = \sin(x - t)$$, we would use the following code:

real function f(x, t)
implicit none
real, intent(in) :: x, t

f = sin(x - t)
end function

Explanation of the above code:

• real function f(x, t) defines a function f with two arguments x and t, which returns a real value.
• intent(in) indicated that x and t are input arguments that will not be modified inside the function.
• f = sin(x - t) assigns the value of sin(x - t) to f, and this value is then the result of the function.

You can then use this function in your code as any other Fortran function:

program fnc
implicit none
real :: x, y
real, external :: f
x = 0.1
y = f(x, 0.5)

write(*,*)y
end program
• external indicates that f is a function, not a variable.
• f(x, 0.5) evaluates function with arguments x and 0.5.

See the file function.f90 for the complete code.

## Euler method

Suppose that we want to solve an ordinary differential equation

\left\{ \begin{aligned} x'(t) &= f(x(t), t), && t > 0,\\ x(0) &= x_0. \end{aligned} \right.

Knowing the value of the solution of $$x$$ at time $$t$$, we want to find the solution at $$t + h$$ for some $$h > 0$$.

We use the Taylor series

\begin{aligned} x(t + h) &= x(t) + h x'(t) + O(h^2)\\ &= x(t) + h f(x(t), t) + O(h^2). \end{aligned}

Here $$O(h^2)$$ is the discretization error, and we indicate that it is proportional to $$h^2$$ for small $$h$$.

If we neglect $$O(h^2)$$ then we can approximate $$x(t + h)$$ by $$x(t) + h f(x(t), t)$$. Doing this iteratively, we get a sequence $$x_0, x_1, x_2, \ldots$$ such that $$x_0$$ is the initial condition, and then to obtain $$x_i$$ from $$x_{i - 1}$$ we use the relation

$x_i = x_{i - 1} + h f(x_{i - 1}, (i - 1) h), \qquad i = 1, \ldots$

Such $$x_i$$ is a numerical approximation of the exact solution $$x$$ at time $$t = ih$$. This is the Euler method for solving an ordinary differential equation. See the wikipedia article for more information.

This simple relation can be expressed in Fortran using the do loop and one variable x that represents the value $$x_i$$ as it is iteratively updated.

The Fortran code is in the file euler.f90. In that code we use the right-hand side $$f(x, t) = x$$ and initial data $$x(0) = 1$$, the time step $$h = 0.1$$ and find the numerical solution for $$N = 10$$ time steps.

Exercise: Modify euler.f90 to solve the ODE

\left\{ \begin{aligned} x' &= \sin(x - t), && t > 0,\\ x(0) &= 0. \end{aligned} \right.

with $$h = 0.01$$ for $$N = 100$$ time steps. Plot the result in gnuplot.

### Error of the Euler method

The value $$x_i$$ is an approximation of $$x(i h)$$, the exact solution. Since we neglected the higher order terms $$O(h^2)$$ in the Taylor expansion, in general $$x_i$$ differs from $$x(i h)$$. At a fixed time $$t$$, this difference is called the global truncation error of the numerical method. However, we expect that when we take$$h$$ smaller, the error will decrease. It is important to estimate how exactly the error depends on the choice of $$h$$.

To find this estimate, we shall apply the Euler method with various $$h$$ and compare the result with the value of the exact solution. We again consider $$f(x, t) = x$$ with initial data $$x(0) = 1$$ since we know the exact solution $$x(t) = \exp(t)$$.

We take a sequence $$N = 1, 2, 4, 8, \ldots, 2^{10} = 1024$$ and set $$h = 1 / N$$. Using the Euler method, we find $$x_N$$ which approximates the value $$x(N h) = x(1) = \exp(1) = e$$.

We can implement this in Fortran using two nested do loops: the outer one iterates over the values of $$N$$ and the inner one is the Euler method.

The full code is in the file euler-error.f90. When running this, the code prints out the table of values of $$h$$ and the error $$|x_N - x(N h)|$$ which is the global truncation error at time $$t = 1$$.

Save the output in a file error.dat by redirecting the output to a file:

$gfortran euler-error.f90 -o a.exe$ ./a.exe > error.dat

### Plotting the errors in gnuplot

Open gnuplot and run the following command.

plot 'error.dat'

This is the graph of the dependence of the error of the method on $$h$$. However, this plot is not very useful since the scale of the values varies so much. It is difficult to see what is happening for small values of $$h$$, and those are the interesting values. We therefore use the logarithmic scale instead. This way we can represent vastly different scales of our variables. This can be done in gnuplot using

set logscale xy
plot 'error.dat'

Now the points are distributed uniformly, but the labels on the axes indicate a logarithmic scale.

To find the order of the method, we need to find $$k$$ such that the error behaves like $$h^k$$. To do this, we plot the functions $$x$$, $$x^2$$ and $$x^3$$ together with the data points.

set logscale xy
plot 'error.dat', x, x**2, x**3

From this plot we should see that the error points form a line parallel to the graph of $$x$$. Therefore we deduce that the Euler method is of order 1, that is, the error at a given time is proportional to $$h$$. (This is not very good, by the way. We will later see how to improve this significantly.)

We can add labels to make a nicer picture:

set title "Error of the Euler method"
set xlabel "h"
set ylabel "err"
set key right bottom
set logscale xy
plot 'error.dat', x, x**2, x**3

To not have to repeat the above commands every time, we can save them in a file, for instance error.plt. In the script, you can use # for comments. See the error.plt file for the explanation of each line. Then we can run all of them at once by using

\$ gnuplot error.plt