# Function spaces¶

Function spaces form a central part of Bempp. They store information about bases on elements and the mappings of local to global degrees of freedom (dofs).

## Local vs global dofs¶

A function space associates with each element i in the grid a local basis of functions $$S_i^{loc} := \{\Phi_{i, 1}^{loc}, \dots, \Phi_{i, n_i}^{loc}\}$$, where the support of each local basis function $$\Phi_{i, j}^{loc}$$ is restricted to element i.

A global basis function is a weighted sum of all local basis functions of the form

$\Phi_{\ell} = \sum_{i}\sum_{j}\delta_{i, j}^{\ell}c_{i, j}\Phi_{i, j}^{loc}$

The coefficients $$c_{i, j}$$ are the local multipliers and are independent of the global basis functions. The values $$\delta_{i, j}^{\ell}$$ take the value 1 if the local basis function contributes to the global basis function or zero otherwise.

Let’s make an example. The usual finite element hat functions are defined as continuous, elementwise linear functions such that

$\Phi_{\ell}(p_k) = \begin{cases}0, & k = \ell\\ 1, &\text{otherwise} \end{cases}.$

Here, $$p_k$$ is the kth vertex in the grid. The local basis functions $$\Phi_{i, j}^{loc}$$, $$j=1, \dots, 3$$ on element i are defined as linear functions which are 1 on the jth vertex of the element and 0 on the other two vertices.

The local multipliers $$c_{i, j}$$ are all 1, and the indices $$\delta_{i, j}^{\ell}$$ are 1 for all local basis functions whose nonzero vertex is identical to the global vertex $$p_{\ell}$$.

## Defining a function space¶

To define a function space we require a grid object. We can then use the function_space method to intitialise a new space. To define a space of piecewise constant functions we use the command

spce = bempp.api.function_space(grid, "DP", 0)


The parameter DP is short for Discontinuous Polynomial. The number 0 is the degree of the polynomial space. To define a space of continuous, piecewise linear functions use

space = bempp.api.function_space(grid, "P", 1)


Bempp-cl only supports function spaces up to degree 1. This is an important difference to earlier versions that also supported higher order spaces.