ABSTRACT
Chapter 1
Introduction
As stated in the preface, we assume that the reader knows the basic concepts
of the nite element method (see, e.g., [11, 39, 46, 47, 119, 178, 180, 191]).
Nevertheless, let us review at least the most commonly used concepts { scalar
and vector-valued Hilbert spaces, trivia of nite elements in these spaces,
basic principles of the discretization of time-independent and evolutionary
problems and a few additional topics that will be important for higher-order
nite element technology.
