The discontinuous Galerkin methods are locally conservative, high‐order accurate, and robust methods that can easily handle elements of arbitrary shapes, irregular triangulations with hanging nodes, and polynomial approximations of different degrees in different elements. These properties, which render them ideal for
hp
‐adaptivity in domains of complex geometry, have brought them to the main stream of computational fluid dynamics. In this paper, we study the properties of the DG methods as applied to a wide variety of problems, including linear, symmetric hyperbolic systems, the Euler equations of gas dynamics, purely elliptic problems, and the incompressible and compressible Navier–Stokes equations. In each instance, we discuss the main properties of the methods, display the mechanisms that make them work so well, and present numerical experiments showing their performance.