2. Approximate Calculation of the Stieltjes Integral
In this section, we construct quadrature formulas to calculate the Stieltjes integral over non-rectifiable curves and fractals.
The most natural way is to calculate the Stieltjes integral (
1) using known quadrature formulas, which is applied for the integral (
2). Using (
2), however, requires an explicit form of the function
. Constructing it in general form is very complicated, if not impossible. Therefore, using (
2) in approximate calculations is difficult. So, the more natural way is to employ the Definition 6—or an equivalent Equation (
5)—for complex functions and the corresponding vector fields.
In this section, we present the method for calculation of integrals of continuous functions over non-rectifiable curves and fractals under the condition that the integral over non-rectifiable curve is understood in the sense of Definition 6.
We shall assume—without loss of generality—that the curve is a closed contour. If the curve does not form a closed contour, we can connect its start and end points with a smooth curve and perform two separate calculations for a closed partially fractal contour and its smooth part.
For example, let us assume that a non-rectifiable curve with the start point B and the end point C lies in the plane of the complex variable z, in the region . Let be an analytic function defined on . Connect the points B and C with polygon lying in D. Any piece-wise smooth function suitable for quadrature formula construction can be selected.
Let . Since then . Thus, if we deal with an analytic function defined in the region , the problem reduces to the calculation of Riemann integral over a rectifiable curve .
Now, let us turn to a general case.
Assume that the function , has a continuously differentiable extension in .
Consider several algorithms to calculate the integral (
4).
Let . Assume the region is within the square .
Let stand for squares . Let .
Construct the cubature formula to calculate the integral (
4). Let
. Then,
Here, means summation over indexes such that , and is the total residual term (the error).
There are two contributions to the error of the method: an error of the rectangle cubature formula over
squares that do not have common points with
and an error over the boundary
The contribution to the residue corresponds to changing the domain of integration from to , where the symbol stands for a union of the tiles we use in the cubature rule.
Obviously, the first component does not exceed (the error of the rectangle cubature formula for double integral, and is the Hölder class exponent).
To estimate the second term, it is necessary to estimate the number of squares covering the curve . In doing so, we employ fractal measure (Minkowski’s measure).
Definition 13 ([
39])
. Let be a compact set on the plane. Divide the plane onto squares with sides . Let stand for the number of squares that have intersections with . The quantityis called the upper metric dimension of the set . It follows from the definition that for the cubature formula in question Here,
The maximum error of the rectangular quadrature rule in the square
does not exceed
. If the square
intersects the region
and is not included in the number of the squares to be summed in (
6), then its lack in the cubature Formula (
6) introduces the error of the order
. Thus, the quantity of the second component of the error of the cubature Formula (
6) does not exceed
where
is the metric dimension of the fractal
.
Therefore the error of (
6) is
. So, we have come up with the following theorem.
Theorem 1. Let . The cubature Formula (6) has the error where is metric dimension of the set , and C and M are independent positive constants. Now, let us look at the case of a smoother function f, where, for instance, we assume that . We will use the same notation. Let the region lie inside a square . In each square , the function will be approximated with interpolation polynomial constructed with respect to equidistant points.
We will calculate the integral
by the quadrature formula
Here,
means summation over indexes
so that
, the error
is determined the same way as in Equation (
6).
Employing the estimates of the constructive theory of functions [
40], we have
Thus, we have proved the following assertion.
Theorem 2. Let . The cubature Formula (7) has the error , where is upper metric dimension of the set , C and M are independent positive constants. From the estimate of
given in Theorem 2 we see that the contributions to the error of the quadrature coming from the squares that enter the sum
and that coming from omitting the squares crossed by the region boundary are not equal. It would be just natural to modify the quadrature (
7) so that the contributions equalize. For this purpose, we introduce a finer supplementary grid
which allows us to compensate for the slow decay of the second term and which contributes only in the near-boundary region.
Cover the region by squares .
We shall calculate integral (
1) using the cubature
Here,
means summation over the squares
for which the measure of intersection with
is zero and their centers
belong to
. In this case, the error of the cubature is
Now, we shall assume that the function is not defined in . In this case, to construct cubature formulas we employ the Whitney extension of the function onto region . Finally, we obtain the following cubature formulas.
Let
Then, the cubature formula reads
Knowing that , we have
We now consider another approach to calculating integrals over non-rectifiable curves and fractals by calculating the contour integral directly.
Let us calculate the integral
. On contour
, we choose
n equidistant points
. Using the following notation
,
, we construct a quadrature
Let us estimate the error:
Parameters h and n are related as , where is the fractal dimensionality of the contour and l is its length in fractal measure.
Remark 3. As the nodes of the quadrature we can choose any points of the complex plane that deviate from by no more than h, it does not affect the error estimate.
3. Approximate Calculation of Singular Integrals
In this section, we shall use the same notation. Let , where is the cell dimension of the curve .
We shall construct cubature formulas to calculate singular integrals on the class of functions
based on the following formula
Let the region be within the square . Let stand for squares , , , , , . Let , , , , .
Construct the cubature formula
Here,
means summation over indexes
so that the nodes
are within the region
,
is the error of the cubature Formula (
11), and
has the same meaning as in Equation (
6). We call the squares
marked if they are entirely in the region
,
.
Let us estimate the error of the cubature Formula (
11), which consists of three components: first, the accuracy of calculation of the integrals defined in marked squares; second, in the cubature Formula (
11), we do not count the squares, whose centers are outside the region
; third, when constructing Formula (
11), we disregard the fact that if the distance between the center of the square
and the boundary of the region
is less than
, then
. We estimate each of the components. Let
.
Here and below, C stands for positive constants that do not depend on n.
Let us estimate the second contribution to the error of cubature (
11). This estimate essentially depends on the topology of the fractal
.
During the cubature construction, the region has been covered by squares with the side . Let us enumerate the squares crossed by counterclockwise starting from the one with the singularity point t. We shall call these squares marked.
Consider two limiting cases. First, we shall assume that the fractal is covered by a rather coarse grid or that its structure approaches the structure of a smooth curve. In this case, the number of tiles crossed by the contour in the vicinity of the singularity is limited to just the two nearest tiles. In the second case, the grid is dense enough to cover the finest variations in the fractal curve and those variations scale, so most of the tiles that neighbor the singularity are crossed by the contour.
In the first case, the distance from the squares
in the vicinity of the singularity point
t and the singularity can be estimated as
where
,
is the s-th marked square and. Then, if the
m-th marked square is missed in the summation, the lack of its contribution leads to the error
The squares more distant from the singularity contribute
to the error. So, the second component of the error can be estimated as
where
m is the number of marked squares. Let
L be the Hausdorff measure of the fractal
, then
, and we can conclude
In the second case, as before, we start marking the squares from
which contains the singularity point.
is surrounded by eight squares
, the next layer contains 16 squares, and, generally, the i-th layer from
contains
tiles. Now, we shall assume that all the squares around
up to the r-th layer are marked. As they do not contribute to the sum, they introduce the error
So, we can conclude that each layer introduces the error
, and we have to estimate the number of such “boundary” layers
r. For this purpose, let us compare the number of marked cells
with characteristic length
of the fractal. Obviously,
. Thus, the second contribution to the error has the order of
Combining the obtained estimates leads us to the following assertion.
Theorem 3. Let . The cubature Formula (11) has the error Here, is upper metric dimension of the set , and are independent positive constants.
Now, consider the case of a smoother function. Let . Let the region be within the square . We will use the foregoing notation. We will approximate function in each square by the interpolating polynomial constructed with respect to equidistant nodes.
Let us construct the cubature formula
Here, means summation over indexes so that the nodes lie in the region , is the error of the cubature formula when calculating the singular integral on the function .
Repeating the foregoing arguments (given standard estimates of constructive function theory [
40]) leads us to the following assertion.
Theorem 4. Let . The cubature Formula (13) has the error Here, is upper metric dimension of the set , and are independent positive constants.
5. Numerical Illustrations
In this section, we give a few examples of numerical calculations for integrals over fractals. As test fractals, we choose the Koch snowflake and its analog based on scaled squares (see
Figure 1a,b). We shall refer them to as fractals “a” and “b”. The corresponding fractal dimensions for the fractals “a” and “b” are
and
.
As integrands, we use five functions. For examples of regular functions, we use
and
As singular function integrands, we employ
and
Finally, for an example of hypersingular integral, we use the following integrand
We perform two versions of calculations for the corresponding contour integrals: the first is based on Formula (
7) and its analog for the singular case (
11), and the second corresponds to a direct calculation of the integral over the corresponding prefractals with mid-point or trapezoidal rules. The results of calculations for the integral
for regular functions are given in
Table 1. As the function
is linear in both arguments, the midpoint rule gives an exact result for both approaches. The numerical results for a given order of the prefractal match exactly. The results for function
obtained by direct calculation and by Formula (
7) also agree well. This demonstrates the correctness of the integral over fractals definitions that we have been using.
The case of singular functions is less trivial. Even an elementary direct calculation of an integral over a contour meets some unexpected complications. In the example above we chose the step of the quadrature as the length of the corresponding prefractal side. This choice does not guarantee convergence to a correct result in some contour geometries.
Consider a sequence of contours composed of the prefractals for the fractal
Figure 1 shifted so that the lowest side of each prefractal is centered at the singularity point
(
Figure 2). The sides of the prefractal scale are
, where
k is the order of the prefractal.
In order to calculate the singular integral over the contour, we employ the trapezoidal rule on each side of the prefractal. Even though the integration step goes to zero, any fixed order quadrature formula has a constant error contribution in the vicinity of the singular point. In order to compensate for this effect, we either have to use a sufficiently high order quadrature or further subdivide the sides of the prefractal. This effect has little to do with the fractal-like structure of the contour and can be also observed with piece-wise smooth contours of certain geometries. We attract the readers’ attention to this peculiarity only as a warning that the experience in numerical calculations of principal value integrals over real ranges does not always translate directly to their complex contour integral counterparts. The results of calculations are summarized in
Table 2.
As we have mentioned above, the singularity contribution
when Formula (
11) is employed strongly depends on the approximation of the fractal and can vary between 0 and
. We have constructed the prefractal contours so that the singularity always strikes at the middle of one of the straight sides of the prefractal, which corresponds to the
, as if the fractal is approximated by a smooth contour. Here, we emphasize one more time that this choice is a result of a somewhat arbitrary convention that we make when performing singular integral calculations over a fractal. For instance, if we shift the prefractals in
Figure 2 so that the singularity at
hits the vertex of the prefractals rather than a midpoint of the side, the limiting fractal will be exactly the same, as the side length goes to zero, but the value of the integral would change from
to
.
The results of calculations for
are summarized in
Table 3. As the function is not analytical, unlike the previous example, the contribution of the double integral in Equation (
11) is not trivial. Direct calculations are preformed using an eight-point Gauss–Legendre rule, which guarantees eight significant digits in our case. The results of direct calculations of the integral agree well with the calculations performed on the base of Formula (
11). Again, the values that we report here are based on the same convention as in the previous example.
Another enlightening example of the delicacy of singular integrals over fractals can be given by calculating the integrals of functions
and
over fractal “b”. Both approaches to the calculation of the integral
give identical results provided the singularity contribution in Formula (
11) is chosen correctly. But an infinitesimal—in the infinite prefractal order limits—shift of the contour to place the singularity at one of the nearest sides of the prefractals changes the result to
. The numerical results for
are given in
Table 4.
Finally, we give an example of a hypersingular integral calculation. We calculate the integral using Definition 12
The calculations have been performed with parameters
,
and
. The results of calculations are given in
Table 5. If no regularization is applied, the direct calculation of the contour integral at the left-hand side of Equation (
16) is not feasible as the real part of the integral rapidly diverges. The imaginary part of the directly evaluated integral, however, is finite and evaluates to the values close to
consistent with the results evaluated from (
16) and (
17).
6. Discussion and Conclusions
We have discussed definitions of regular, singular and hypersingular contour integrals over non-rectifiable curves and fractals. One of the main observation is in the difference between singular (hypersingular) integrals over piece-wise smooth curves and fractals. Let us emphasize this difference.
Consider an integral
where
is a closed bounded curve. Suppose that
is a smooth curve and
. The integral
is a singular integral, and some regularization is required. The standard regularization method is
It is known [
1], that for a smooth closed curve
If satisfies the Hölder condition, then is a definite integral. To calculate it, we use standard quadrature formulas.
In some form or other, this scheme can be applied to the construction of quadrature formulas for the calculation of singular integrals.
Now, let
be a piece-wise smooth curve, and
be a point where there is no tangent to the given curve. For
, the regularization of the integral
is implemented by the formula [
1]
where
is an angle between left and right tangents to the curve
at the point
.
For non-rectifiable curves, the construction described above is not applicable. There is, at least, a countable set of points where the curve has no tangent lines. Moreover, left and right tangent lines may have different angles between them at different points. There are also curves with no tangent line at any point.
To calculate singular integral over a non-rectifiable curve or fractal, we implement the regularization similar to the regularization for a piece-wise smooth curve
The first integral is calculated by Stokes’s formula and the Whitney extension
where
is the Whitney extension for
f.
The second integral calculation depends on t. If t is a finite decimal or binary and, for a large enough N, it is included in the list of the vertices of the nth prefractals , then we assume here is an angle between the left and the right tangent lines at the point t of the N-th order prefractal. If the condition is not fulfilled, any value between 0 and can be ascribed to the integral .
Singular and hypersingular integrals are particular cases of generalized functions. In the theory of generalized functions [
38,
41], there is a known statement that all the regularizations differ by a constant. Within this approach, it is legitimate to define—according to Mironova [
37]—a singular integral as
where
is the Whitney extension for
f.
In this work, we define a singular integral by using Formula (
18). This approach is substantiated by the representation of the singularity point
t. If
t is presented as an infinite fraction, then, when solving a particular problem, its value has to be approximated by a finite decimal fraction. Therefore, by choosing an approximate representation of
t and the prefractal sequence, which approximates the fractal curve, the researcher ascribes the value to the singular integral
according to the problem being solved. (It seems that further generalizations of this construction are also possible. For instance, singular and hypersingular integrals over fractals could be treated as stochastic objects with distributions depending on the fractal curve. This approach, however, is subject to future research).
The stability of quadrature and cubature formulas for one- and multi-dimensional singular integrals has been studied in the monograph [
11]. Upper bounds of the errors for a number of cubature formulas have been obtained assuming an
-perturbation of the integrands. Besides the upper bounds, for some cubatures, the expected values for the errors have also been given. These results can be easily transferred to the cubatures discussed in the article.
Similar arguments are applicable to quadrature formulas for hypersingular integrals.
In this paper, we have constructed quadrature and cubature formulas for the calculation of Riemann, singular and hypersingular integrals over non-rectifiable curves and fractals. Some quadrature and cubature formulas have been constructed based on various definitions of integrals over non-rectifiable curves and fractals. We obtained error estimates on classes of functions having derivatives of the first order satisfied the Hölder condition with .
The obtained results show that having derivatives greater than the first order does not affect the accuracy of cubature formulas with rectangular grids. To increase the accuracy of cubature formulas, it is necessary to construct cubature formulas with several grids, which account for the boundary layer. A similar problem arises when we construct cubature formulas to calculate integrals over non-rectifiable curves and fractals based on the Whitney extension. This is caused by the feature of Whitney’s extension: the extension of function defined on the boundary of region D has derivatives of the first order in and , .
The authors intend to construct cubature formulas with variable grids accounting for the boundary layer in future works.