stencil in finite difference

Hi
Sorry for the stupid question, but what is exactly a "stencil" in finite difference methods ?
Is the results of the expansion points ?
Cheers
Alex
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 Recognitions: Homework Help This is also called a computational molecule in some texts, it basically is the recurrence relation that you use to calculate the next point in your calculation, so for example a stencil for the Euler method for the ODE $\frac{du}{dx}=f(x,u)$ would be: $$u_{n+1}=u_{n}+hf(x_{n},u_{n})$$ For PDEs it would be something more complicated. I hope you get the general idea.

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