This book stems from the long standing teaching experience of the
authors in the courses on Numerical Methods in Engineering and Numerical
Methods for Partial Differential Equations given to undergraduate and
graduate students of Politecnico di Milano (Italy), EPFL Lausanne
(Switzerland), University of Bergamo (Italy) and Emory University
(Atlanta, USA). It aims at introducing students to the numerical
approximation of Partial Differential Equations (PDEs). One of the
difficulties of this subject is to identify the right trade-off between
theoretical concepts and their actual use in practice. With this
collection of examples and exercises we try to address this issue by
illustrating academic examples which focus on basic concepts of
Numerical Analysis as well as problems derived from practical
application which the student is encouraged to formalize in terms of
PDEs, analyze and solve. The latter examples are derived from the
experience of the authors in research project developed in collaboration
with scientists of different fields (biology, medicine, etc.) and
industry. We wanted this book to be useful both to readers more
interested in the theoretical aspects and those more concerned with the
numerical implementation.