Closer to the solutions: iterative linear solvers

The solution of dense linear systems received much attention after the second world war, and by the end of the sixties, most of the problems associated with it had been solved. For a long time, Wilkinson's \The Algebraic Eigenvalue Problem" [107], other than the title suggests, became also the standard textbook for the solution of linear systems. When it became clear that partial dierential equations could be solved numerically, to a level of accuracy that was of interest for application areas (such as reservoir engineering, and reactor diusion modeling), there was a strong need for the fast solution of the discretized systems, and iterative methods became popular for these problems