Notes on the Discontinuous Galerkin methods for the numerical simulation of hyperbolic equations 1 General Context 1.1 Bibliography

Abstract

The roots of Discontinuous Galerkin (DG) methods is usually attributed to Reed and Hills in a paper published in 1973 on the numerical approximation of the neutron transport equation [18]. In fact, the adventure really started with a rather thoroughfull series of five papers by Cockburn and Shu in the late 80's [7, 5, 9, 6, 8]. Then, the fame of the method, which could be seen as a compromise between Finite Elements (the center of the method being a weak formulation) and Finite Volumes (the basis functions are defined cell-wise, the cells being the elements of the primal mesh) increased and slowly investigated successfully all the domains of Partial Differential Equations numerical integration. In particular, one can cite the ground papers for the common treatment of convection-diffusion equations [4, 3] or the treatment of pure elliptic equations [2, 17]. For more information on the history of Discontinuous Galerkin method, please refer to section 1.1 of [15]. Today, DG methods are widely used in all kind of manners and have applications in almost all fields of applied mathematics. (TODO: cite applications and structured/unstructured meshes, steady/unsteady, etc...). The methods is now mature enough to deserve entire text books, among which I cite a reference book on Nodal DG Methods by Henthaven and Warburton [15] with the ground basis of DG integration, numerical analysis of its linear behavior and generalization to multiple dimensions. Lately, since 2010, thanks to a ground work of Zhang and Shu [26, 27, 25, 28, 29], Discontinuous Galerkin methods are eventually able to combine high order accuracy and certain preservation of convex constraints, such as the positivity of a given quantity, for example. These new steps forward are very promising since it brings us very close to the "Ultimate Conservative Scheme", [23, 1].