  Butcher series are combinatorial devices used in the study of numerical
methods for differential equations evolving on vector spaces. More precisely,
they are formal series developments of differential operators indexed over
rooted trees, and can be used to represent a large class of numerical methods.
The theory of backward error analysis for differential equations has a
particularly nice description when applied to methods represented by Butcher
series. For the study of differential equations evolving on more general
manifolds, a generalization of Butcher series has been introduced, called
Lie--Butcher series. This paper presents the theory of backward error analysis
for methods based on Lie--Butcher series.
