A class of finite element methods, the Discontinuous Galerkin Methods
(DGM), has been under rapid development recently and has found its use
very quickly in such diverse applications as aeroacoustics,
semi-conductor device simula- tion, turbomachinery, turbulent flows,
materials processing, MHD and plasma simulations, and image processing.
While there has been a lot of interest from mathematicians, physicists
and engineers in DGM, only scattered information is available and there
has been no prior effort in organizing and publishing the existing
volume of knowledge on this subject. In May 24-26, 1999 we organized in
Newport (Rhode Island, USA), the first international symposium on DGM
with equal emphasis on the theory, numerical implementation, and
applications. Eighteen invited speakers, lead- ers in the field, and
thirty-two contributors presented various aspects and addressed open
issues on DGM. In this volume we include forty-nine papers presented in
the Symposium as well as a survey paper written by the organiz- ers. All
papers were peer-reviewed. A summary of these papers is included in the
survey paper, which also provides a historical perspective of the
evolution of DGM and its relation to other numerical methods. We hope
this volume will become a major reference in this topic. It is intended
for students and researchers who work in theory and application of
numerical solution of convection dominated partial differential
equations. The papers were written with the assumption that the reader
has some knowledge of classical finite elements and finite volume
methods.