Hello all, I am new to FEniCS and have been trying to follow along with the book “Solving PDEs in Python - The FEniCS Tutorial Volume 1” for several weeks but I find it to be too difficult to grasp. And a lot of the supplementary references given by that book are even more difficult. I am a third year engineering major so I have taken my calculus, linear algebra (introductory), and ordinary differential equations (with an introduction to PDEs) but I am still lost as I try to follow along with the literature and I am skeptical that grinding through tons of theory will help me get started (I am not afraid of learning new math but I am unsure if spending months learning the theory is the best approach).
In any case, I ask if you all may share your experience with learning this software and can offer any advice for getting started or if you know of any material that shares an intuitive approach to what the code is doing with a brief explanation of the math that would be greatly appreciated.
If you want to learn the basics, i can highly recommend these lecture note by H.P. Langtangen: http://hplgit.github.io/num-methods-for-PDEs/doc/pub/index.html
Here you can cherry pick topics after what you would like to solve, from approximation of 1D functions to more advanced topics.
Also this one - again by Langtanen, is specifically based around fenics https://hplgit.github.io/fem-book/doc/pub/book/pdf/fem-book-4print.pdf
I personally found section 2.1 of that book very helpful , i.e. the idea that the Galerkin method is based around making sure that the error is orthogonal to every basis vector.
For general concepts I found the youtube videos on Topology by XylyXylyX good - but that might be because the problems I am looking at are on manifolds - it might not be so useful for your field.
You said , “I am skeptical that grinding through tons of theory will help me”, from my limited experience, learning the maths is always worth it, if you are “grinding through it” then probably you just haven’t found the material which is in the right style for you. A lot of maths seems scary because of the the notation and “short hand” but once you have learnt the language it becomes simple. Good luck.