Christian Kreuzer: 23 February at 10h45 am, A415 Inria Paris.
It is a well known fact that inf-sup stable Galerkin discretisations of linear continuous problem provide quasi-optimal approximations in the corresponding norms. For elliptic problems, this is e.g. known as Cea’s Lemma. A priori error bounds are then typically obtained with the help of some (quasi)-interpolation.
We apply this principle to parabolic problems and prove inf-sup stability and thus quasi-optimality of space and time adaptive backward Euler-Galerkin discretisations. In a second step, we define a reasonable (quasi)-interpolation operator and conclude a priori error bounds. In 1982 Dupont presented a counter example showing non-convergence of the backward Euler-Galerkin in the presence of spatial mesh changes. In this case, our bound contains an additional term, which is consistent with Dupont’s observation.
