Minimal residual discretization of a class of fully nonlinear elliptic PDE

Abstract This work introduces finite-element methods for a class of elliptic fully nonlinear partial differential equations. They are based on a minimal residual principle that builds upon the Alexandrov–Bakelman–Pucci estimate. Under rather general structural assumptions on the operator, convergence of $C^{1}$ conforming and discontinuous Galerkin methods is proven in the $L^{^\infty} $ norm. Numerical experiments on the performance of adaptive mesh refinement driven by local information of the residual in two and three space dimensions are provided.