Adaptive Finite Element Methods for Differential Equations

These Lecture Notes have been compiled from the material presented by the second author in a lecture series ('Nachdiplomvorlesung') at the Department of Mathematics of the ETH Zurich during the summer term 2002. Concepts of 'self­ adaptivity' in the numerical solution of differential equations are discussed with emphasis on Galerkin finite element methods. The key issues are a posteriori er­ ror estimation and automatic mesh adaptation. Besides the traditional approach of energy-norm error contr