An iterative method for solving electrostatic problems

The method of steepest descent is applied to the solution of electrostatic problems. The relation between this method and the Rayleigh-Ritz, Galerkin's, and the method of least squares is outlined. Also, explicit error formulas are given for the rate of convergence for this method. It is shown that this method is also suitable for solving singular operator equations. In that case this method monotonically converges to the solution with minimum norm. Finally, it is shown that the technique yields as a by-product the smallest eigenvalue of the operator in the finite dimensional space in which the problem is solved. Numerical results are presented only for the electrostatic case to illustrate the validity of this procedure which show excellent agreement with other available data.