Discrete mathematics, discrete physics and numerical methods

Abstract

Discrete mathematics has been neglected for a long time. It has been put in the shade by the striking success of continuous mathematics in the last two centuries, mainly because continuous models in physics proved very reliable, but also because of the greater difficulty in dealing with it. This perspective has been rapidly changing in the last years owing to the needs of the numerical analysis and, more recently, of the so called discrete physics. In this paper, starting from some sentences of Fichera about discrete and continuous world, we shall present some considerations about discrete phenomena which arise when designing numerical methods or discrete models for some classical physical problems.