Finite Element Assembly

The finite element method may be viewed as a method for forming a discrete linear system 4064 AU = b or nonlinear system b(U) = 0 corresponding to the discretization of the variational form of a 4065 differential equation.A central part of the implementation of finite element methods is therefore the 4066 computation of matrices and vectors from variational forms.In this chapter, we describe the standard 4067 algorithm for computing the discrete operator (tensor) A