Finite Element Course at AIMS Rwanda

The Firedrake Team will be delivering a finite element course, with practical examples in Firedrake (of course!) at the African Institute for Mathematical Sciences Rwanda from 8 to 12 April 2025.

Course programme

The course will draw heavily on the materials for a finite element course taught at Imperial College London and the Firedrake manual.

The materials most relevant for each section are linked below, but further reading is available on the links above.

	Tuesday	Wednesday	Thursday	Friday	Saturday
Early AM	Function spaces and inner products	The Ciarlet finite element	Nonlinear problems	Devito: sympy, Devito, Acoustic Wave equation	Software for adjoints: differentiable programming
Late AM	Our first finite element problem	Firedrake practical 3: vector-valued problems	Firedrake practical 5: The Burgers equation	Adjoints part 1: derivation	Adjoint practical 2: the tape
Early PM	Firedrake practical 1: Helmholtz Equation	Systems with more than one variable	An introduction to solvers and preconditioners	Devito: Full Waveform Inversion	Deep learning introduction, practical
Late PM	Firedrake practical 2: Dirichlet boundary conditions	Firedrake practical 4: mixed Poisson	Firedrake practical 6: solvers	Adjoint practical 1: Burgers again	Scientific machine learning, practical

Course lecturers

• David Ham, Department of Mathematics, Imperial College London

• Nicolas Boullé, Department of Mathematics, Imperial College London

• Jack Betteridge, Devito Codes and Department of Mathematics, Imperial College London