Equations with infinite delay: pseudospectral discretization for numerical stability and bifurcation in an abstract framework

We consider nonlinear delay differential and renewal equations with infinite delay. We extend the work of Gyllenberg et al, Appl. Math. Comput. (2018) by introducing a unifying abstract framework and derive a finite-dimensional approximating system via pseudospectral discretization. For renewal equations, via integration we consider a reformulation in a space of absolutely continuous functions that ensures that point evaluation is well defined. We prove the one-to-one correspondence of equilibria between the original equation and its approximation, and that linearization and discretization commute. Our most important result is the proof of convergence of the characteristic roots of the pseudospectral approximation of the linear(ized) equations, which ensures that the finite-dimensional system correctly reproduces the stability properties of the original linear equation if the dimension of the approximation is large enough. This result is illustrated with several numerical tests, which also demonstrate the effectiveness of the approach for the bifurcation analysis of equilibria of nonlinear equations.