We prove strong convergence of order 1/4 - E for arbitrarily small E > 0 of the Euler-Maruyama method for multidimensional stochastic differential equations (SDEs) with discontinuous drift and degenerate diffusion coefficient. The proof is based on estimating the difference between the Euler-Maruyama scheme and another numerical method, which is constructed by applying the Euler-Maruyama scheme to a transformation of the SDE we aim to solve.

We study the convergence of a nonlinear approximation method introduced in the engineering literature for the numerical solution of a high-dimensional Fokker--Planck equation featuring in Navier--Stokes--Fokker--Planck systems that arise in kinetic models of dilute polymers. To do so, we build on the analysis carried out recently by Le~Bris, Leli\`evre and Maday (Const. Approx. 30: 621--651, 2009) in the case of Poisson's equation on a rectangular domain in $\mathbb{R}^2$, subject to a homogeneous Dirichlet boundary condition, where they exploited the connection of the approximation method with the greedy algorithms from nonlinear approximation theory explored, for example, by DeVore and Temlyakov (Adv. Comput. Math. 5:173--187, 1996). We extend the convergence analysis of the pure greedy and orthogonal greedy algorithms considered by Le~Bris, Leli\`evre and Maday to the technically more complicated situation of the elliptic Fokker--Planck equation, where the role of the Laplace operator is played out by a high-dimensional Ornstein--Uhlenbeck operator with unbounded drift, of the kind that appears in Fokker--Planck equations that arise in bead-spring chain type kinetic polymer models with finitely extensible nonlinear elastic potentials, posed on a high-dimensional Cartesian product configuration space $\mathsf{D} = D_1 \times \dotsm \times D_N$ contained in $\mathbb{R}^{N d}$, where each set $D_i$, $i=1, \dotsc, N$, is a bounded open ball in $\mathbb{R}^d$, $d = 2, 3$. We exploit detailed information on the spectral properties and elliptic regularity of the Ornstein--Uhlenbeck operator to give conditions on the true solution of the Fokker--Planck equation which guarantee certain rates of convergence of the greedy algorithms. We extend the analysis to discretized versions of the greedy algorithms.

This PhD thesis consists of a summary and seven papers, where various applications of auto-validated computations are studied. In the first paper we describe a rigorous method to determine unknown parameters in a system of ordinary differential equations from measured data with known bounds on the noise of the measurements. Papers II, III, IV, and V are concerned with Abelian integrals. In Paper II, we construct an auto-validated algorithm to compute Abelian integrals. In Paper III we investigate, via an example, how one can use this algorithm to determine the possible configurations of limit cycles that can bifurcate from a given Hamiltonian vector field. In Paper IV we construct an example of a perturbation of degree five of a Hamiltonian vector field of degree five, with 27 limit cycles, and in Paper V we construct an example of a perturbation of degree seven of a Hamiltonian vector field of degree seven, with 53 limit cycles. These are new lower bounds for the maximum number of limit cycles that can bifurcate from a Hamiltonian vector field for those degrees. In Papers VI, and VII, we study a certain kind of normal form for real hyperbolic saddles, which is numerically robust. In Paper VI we describe an algorithm how to automatically compute these normal forms in the planar case. In Paper VII we use the properties of the normal form to compute local invariant manifolds in a neighbourhood of the saddle.