The tame Butcher group

Abstract

The Butcher group is a powerful tool to analyse integration methods for ordinary differential equations, in particular Runge--Kutta methods. Recently, a natural Lie group structure has been constructed for this group. Unfortunately, the associated topology is too coarse for some applications in numerical analysis. In the present paper, we propose to remedy this problem by replacing the Butcher group with the subgroup of all exponentially bounded elements. This "tame Butcher group" turns out to be an infinite-dimensional Lie group with respect to a finer topology. As a first application we then show that the correspondence of elements in the tame Butcher group with their associated B-series induces certain Lie group (anti)morphisms.