SOME CURRENT TRENDS IN FINITE ELEMENT RESEARCH.

A survey is given of the application of the finite element method in the field of structural mechanics. The finite element method, as is most commonly practiced, is taken to be the Galerkin finite element method, a special member of the family of so called weighted residual methods in which both trial solutions and weighting functions are selected from the same class of functions. This canonical symmetry of the approximation method turns out to exploit the structure of symmetric operators.