2009 SCAIM Seminar - 06

I will give a transverse introduction to how Boundary Integral techniques (or their numerical version, the Boundary Element Method) have been and are being used for scattering problems. While in the beginning the field of boundary integral equations dealt mainly with simple exterior problems, the study of the scattering of waves by penetrable obstacles offers a set of more realistic problems where BEM techniques have often to be coupled with better known methods for PDEs, such as the Finite Element Method. We will see how a method-oriented approach can be valid for wave problems in the frequency and time domains, and how the Laplace transform plays a surprising role for numerical discretization in the time domain.