UC San Diego

In this dissertation, I will discuss and explore the various theoretical pillars re- quired to investigate the world of discretized gauge theories in a purely classical setting, with the long-term aim of achieving a fully-fledged discretization of General Relativity (GR). I will start with a brief review of differential forms, then present some results on the geometric framework of finite element exterior calculus (FEEC); in particular, I will elaborate on integrating metric structures within the framework and categorize the dual spaces of the various spaces of polynomial differential forms PrΛk(Rn). After a brief pedagogical detour on Noether’s two theorems, I will apply all of the above into discretizations of electromagnetism and linearized GR. I will conclude with an excursion into the geodesic finite element method (GFEM) as a way to generalize some of the above notions to curved manifolds.