“Gentlemen, that is surely true, it is absolutely paradoxical; we cannot understand it, and we don’t know what it means. But we have proved it, and therefore we know it must be the truth.” —Benjamin ...

The so-called Ritz–Galerkin method is one of the most fundamental tools of modern computing. Its origins lie in Hilbert's "direct" approach to the variational calculus of Euler–Lagrange and in the ...