A practical and concise guide to finite difference and finite element methods. Well-tested MATLAB(R) codes are available online.

Zhilin Li is a tenured full professor at the Center for Scientific Computation and the Department of Mathematics, North Carolina State University. His research area is in applied mathematics in general, particularly in numerical analysis for partial differential equations, moving interface/free boundary problems, irregular domain problems, computational mathematical biology, and scientific computing and simulations for interdisciplinary applications. Li has authored one monograph, The Immersed Interface Method, and also edited several books and proceedings.

1. Introduction; Part I. Finite Difference Methods: 2. Finite difference methods for 1D boundary value problems; 3. Finite difference methods for 2D elliptic PDEs; 4. FD methods for parabolic PDEs; 5. Finite difference methods for hyperbolic PDEs; Part II. Finite Element Methods: 6. Finite element methods for 1D boundary value problems; 7. Theoretical foundations of the finite element method; 8. Issues of the FE method in one space dimension; 9. The finite element method for 2D elliptic PDEs; Appendix. Numerical solutions of initial value problems; References; Index.