Homepage for the University of Oxford finite element methods reading group!
Meetings this academic year will be hosted on Fridays from 15:00–16:00 GMT, in S2.37 (when available). You can join on Teams by clicking here, or using the details:
2025–2026
Hilary term
| Week | Date | Topic | Presenter |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | 23.JAN | TBA… | TBA… |
| 2 | 30.JAN | TBA… | TBA… |
| 3 | 06.FEB* | TBA… | TBA… |
| 4 | 13.FEB | TBA… | TBA… |
| 5 | 20.FEB | TBA… | TBA… |
| 6 | 27.FEB | TBA… | TBA… |
| 7 | 06.MAR* | TBA… | TBA… |
| 8 | 13.MAR | TBA… | TBA… |
*Due to clashes, meetings marked with asterices will be in S1.37.
Slides and notes can be found, when available, by clicking the topic titles.
Click here to view references for upcoming presentations.
Click here to hide the records of past presentations.
–2025
For prior years, see Charlie Parker’s page here.
2025–2026
Michaelmas term
| Week | Date | Topic | Presenter |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | 17.OCT | Long steps in gradient descent methods (Grimmer, 2024; Zhigljavsky, Pronzato & Bukina, 2013) | Me (Boris Andrews) |
| 2 | 24.OCT | Sparse direct solvers (Duff, Erisman & Reid, 2017) | Kars Knook |
| 3 | 31.OCT | Group meeting | Everyone |
| 4 | 07.NOV | Preconditioners for PDE timesteppers (Southworth et al., 2022) | Charlie Parker |
| 5 | 14.NOV | From classical thermodynamics to fluid motion (Málek & Průša, 2018) | Jakub Cach |
| 6 | 21.NOV | Turbulence (Layton, 2018) | Mingdong He |
| 7 | 28.NOV | (Break…) | |
| 8 | 05.DEC | Grad–Shafranov: MHD equilibria and how to find them (Schnack, 2009; He et al., 2025; Blickhan, Stratton & Kaptanoglu, 2025) | Tom Higham |
Click here to hide references for upcoming presentations.
2025–2026
Michaelmas term
T. Blickhan, J. Stratton and A. A. Kaptanoglu, MRX: A differentiable 3D MHD equilibrium solver without nested flux surfaces, arXiv (2025), doi:10.48550/arXiv.2510.26986
I. S. Duff, A. M. Erisman and J. K. Reid, Direct Methods for Sparse Matrices. Oxford University Press, 2017
B. Grimmer, Provably faster gradient descent via long steps, SIAM Journal on Optimization, 34 (2024), doi:10.1137/23M1588408
M. He, P. E. Farrell, K. Hu and B. D. Andrews, Helicity-preserving finite element discretization for magnetic relaxation, arXiv (2025), doi:10.48550/arXiv.2501.11654
W. Layton, Introduction to the Numerical Analysis of Incompressible Viscous Flows. SIAM, 2018
J. Málek and V. Průša, Derivation of Equations for Continuum Mechanics and Thermodynamics of Fluids. In Handbook of Mathematical Analysis in Mechanics of Viscous Fluids. Springer, Cham, 2018. doi:10.1007/978-3-319-13344-7_1
D. D. Schnack, Lectures in Magnetohydrodynamics. Springer, 2009
B. S. Southworth, O. Krzysik, W. Pazner and H. De Sterck, Fast solution of fully implicit Runge–Kutta and discontinuous Galerkin in time for numerical PDEs, part I: The linear setting, SIAM Journal on Scientific Computing, 44 (2022), doi:10.1137/21M1389742
A. Zhigljavsky, L. Pronzato and E. Bukina, An asymptotically optimal gradient algorithm for quadratic optimization with low computational cost, Optimization Letters, 7 (2013), doi:10.1007/s11590-012-0491-7
Click here to view the list of suggested papers.