Galerkin Finite Element Approximations of Stochastic Elliptic Partial Differential Equations

We describe and analyze two numerical methods for a linear elliptic problem with stochastic coefficients and homogeneous Dirichlet boundary conditions. Here the aim of the computations is to approximate statistical moments of the solution, and, in particular, we give a priori error estimates for the computation of the expected value of the solution. The first method generates independent identically distributed approximations of the solution by sampling the coefficients of the equation and using a standard Galerkin finite element variational formulation. The Monte Carlo method then uses these approximations to compute corresponding sample averages. The second method is based on a finite dimensional…