A Sparse Spectral Method on Triangles

Sheehan Olver, Alex Townsend, Geoffrey M. Vasil

Abstract: In this paper, we demonstrate that many of the computational tools for univariate orthogonal polynomials have analogues for a family of bivariate orthogonal polynomials on the triangle, including Clenshaw's algorithm and sparse differentiation operators. This allows us to derive a practical spectral method for solving linear partial differential equations on triangles with sparse discretizations. We can thereby rapidly solve partial differential equations using polynomials with degrees in the thousands, resulting in sparse discretizations with as many as several million degrees of freedom.