Error analysis of a boundary element collocation method for a screen problem in ${\bf R}\sp 3$

Abstract
We examine the numerical approximation of the first-kind integral equation on a plane rectangle defined by the single-layer potential of the three-dimensional Laplacian. The solution is approximated by nodal collocation with piecewise bilinear trial functions on a rectangular grid. We prove stability and convergence of this method in the Sobolev space . A key ingredient in the proof is the observation that the collocation equations define symmetric positive definite Toeplitz matrices.