Legendre-tau approximation for functional differential equations. III - Eigenvalue approximations and uniform stability

The stability and convergence properties of the Legendre-tau approximation for hereditary differential systems are analyzed. A characteristic equation is derived for the eigenvalues of the resulting approximate system. As a result of this derivation the uniform exponential stability of the solution semigroup is preserved under approximation. It is the key to obtaining the convergence of approximate solutions of the algebraic Riccati equation in trace norm.