These proceedings originated from a conference commemorating the 50th anniversary of the publication of Richard Courant's seminal paper, Variational Methods for Problems of Equilibrium and Vibration. These papers address fundamental questions in numerical analysis and the special problems that occur in applying the finite element method to various fields of science and engineering.Coupling Mortar Finite Element and Boundary Element Methods for 2D Navier-Stokes Equations; Courant Element: Before and After; Iterative Methods for Solving Stiff Elliptic Problems; Straight and Curved Finite Elements of Class C1 and Some Applications to Thin Shell Problems; Exact Controllability to Solve the Helmholtz Equation with Absorbing Boundary Conditions; Cubic Version of FEM in Elliptic Problems with Interfaces and Singularities; Least Squares Mixed Finite Elements; Turbulence Modelling in Finite Element Industrial Applications; Necessary and Sufficient Conditions for the Numerical Approximation of a Partial Differential Equation Depending on a Small Parameter; Efficient Solution Methods for Compressible Flow Computations; Parallel Finite Volume Algorithms for Solving the Time-Domain Maxwell Equations on Nonstructured Meshes; Coupling Between Nonlinear Maxwell and Heat Equations for an Induction Heating Problem: Modelling and Numerical Methods; Solving the 3D Harmonic Maxwell Equations with Finite Elements, Lagrange Multipliers, and Iterative Methods; Some Applications of the Hierarchic High Order MITC Finite Elements for Reissner-Mindlin Plates; Domain Decomposition for Immiscible Displacement in Single Porosity Systems; An Error Estimator for Nonconforming Approximations of a Nonlinear Problem; Some Observations on Raviart-Thomas Mixed Finite Elements in p Extension for Parabolic Problems; Mixed Finite Element Methods in Fluid Structure Systems; A Black-Box Solver for the Solution of General Nonlinear Functional Equations by Mixed FEM; A Remark on the Asymptotic Behaviour of Parló!