Courant Friedrichs Lewy Condition

Please note that the content of this book primarily consists of articles available from Wikipedia or other free sources online. In mathematics, the Courant Friedrichs Lewy condition (CFL condition) is a necessary condition for convergence while solving certain partial differential equations (usually hyperbolic PDEs) numerically. (It is not in general a sufficient condition.) It arises when explicit time-marching schemes are used for the numerical solution. As a consequence, the timestep must be less than a certain time in many explicit time-marching computer simulations, otherwise the simulation will produce wildly incorrect results. The condition is named after Richard Courant, Kurt Friedrichs, and Hans Lewy who described it in their 1928 paper.