Abstract. Each conservation law of a given partial differential equation is determined (up to equivalence) by a function known as the characteristic. This function is used to find conservation laws, to prove equivalence between conservation laws, and to prove the converse of Noether's Theorem. Transferring these results to difference equations is nontrivial, largely because difference operators are not derivations and do not obey the chain rule for derivatives. We show how these problems may be resolved and illustrate various uses of the characteristic. In particular, we establish the converse of Noether's Theorem for difference equations, we show (without taking a continuum limit) that the conservation laws in the infinite family generated by Rasin and Schiff are distinct, and we obtain all five-point conservation laws for the potential Lotka-Volterra equation.

Conservation laws provide important constraints on the solutions of partial differential equations (PDEs), therefore it is important to preserve them when discretizing such equations. In this paper, a new systematic method for discretizing a PDE, so as to preserve the local form of multiple conservation laws, is presented. The technique, which uses symbolic computation, is applied to the Korteweg-de Vries (KdV) equation to find novel explicit and implicit schemes that have finite difference analogues of its first and second conservation laws and its first and third conservation laws. The resulting schemes are numerically compared with a multisymplectic scheme.

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