This was part of Discrete Exterior Calculus

Finite element form-valued forms

Kaibo Hu, University of Oxford

Thursday, September 4, 2025



Slides
Abstract:

We provide a finite element discretization of $ell$-form-valued $k$-forms on triangulation in $mathbb{R}^{n}$ for general $k$, $ell$ and $n$ and any polynomial degree. The construction generalizes finite element Whitney forms for the de~Rham complex and their high-order and distributional versions, the Regge finite elements and the Christiansen--Regge elasticity complex, the TDNNS element for symmetric stress tensors, the MCS element for traceless matrix fields, the Hellan--Herrmann--Johnson (HHJ) elements for biharmonic equations, and discrete divdiv and Hessian complexes in [Hu, Lin, and Zhang, 2025]. The construction discretizes the Bernstein--Gelfand--Gelfand (BGG) diagrams. Applications of the construction include discretization of strain and stress tensors in continuum mechanics and metric and curvature tensors in differential geometry in any dimension.