Sinc-collocation methods for weakly singular Fredholm integral equations of the second kind

In this paper we propose new numerical methods for linear Fredholm integral equations of the second kind with weakly singular kernels. The methods are developed by means of the Sinc approximation with smoothing transformations, which is an effective technique against the singularities of the equations. Numerical examples show that the methods achieve exponential convergence, and in this sense the methods improve conventional results where only polynomial convergence have been reported so far. (C) 2009 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.