The Basics of Weak Galerkin Finite Element Methods

The goal of this article is to clarify some misunderstandings and inappropriate claims made in [6] regarding the relation between the weak Galerkin (WG) finite element method and the hybridizable discontinuous Galerkin (HDG). In this paper, the authors offered their understandings and interpretations on the weak Galerkin finite element method by describing the basics of the WG method and how WG can be applied to a model PDE problem in various variational forms. In the authors' view, WG-FEM and HDG methods are based on different philosophies and therefore represent different methodologies in numerical PDEs, though they share something in common in their roots. A theory and an example are given to show that the primal WG-FEM is not equivalent to the existing HDG [9].