AbstractThe symmetric Sinc–Galerkin method applied to a sparable second-order self-adjoint elliptic boundary value problem gives rise to a system of linear equations(Ψx⊗Dy+Dx⊗Ψy)u=g,where⊗ is the Kronecker product symbol, Ψx and Ψy are Toeplitz-plus-diagonal matrices, and Dx and Dy are diagonal matrices. The main contribution of this paper is to present and analyze a two-step preconditioning strategy based on the banded matrix approximation (BMA) and the alternating direction implicit (ADI) iteration for these Sinc–Galerkin systems. In particular, we show that the two-step preconditioner is symmetric positive definite, and the condition number of the preconditioned matrix is bounded by the convergence factor of the involved ADI iteration. N...