1 Motivation The Poisson problem has a strong formulation a minimization formulation and a weak formulation T weak formulations are more general than the strong formulation in terms of regularity and admissible data SLIDE 2 The minimization/weak formulations are defined by: a space X; a bilinear The minimization/weak formulations identify ESSENTIAL boundary conditions NATURAL boundary conditions ed in a The points of departure for the finite element method are the weak formulation(more generally) the minimization statement (if a is SPD) 2 The dirichlet problem 2.1 Strong Formulation Find u such that