On the B-series composition theorem

Abstract

The B-series composition theorem has been an important topic in numerical analysis of ordinary differential equations for the past-half century. Traditional proofs of this theorem rely on labelled trees, whereas recent developments in B-series analysis favour the use of unlabelled trees. In this paper, we present a new proof of the B-series composition theorem that does not depend on labelled trees. A key challenge in this approach is accurately counting combinations related to ``pruning.'' This challenge is overcome by introducing the concept of ``assignment.''