We provide conditions for convergence of polyhedral surfaces and their
discrete geometric properties to smooth surfaces embedded in R^3. The
notion of totally normal convergence is shown to be equivalent to the convergence
of either one of the following: surface area, intrinsic metric, and
Laplace-Beltrami operators. We further show that totally normal convergence
implies convergence results for shortest geodesics, mean curvature,
and solutions to the Dirichlet problem. This work provides the justifi-
cation for a discrete theory of differential geometric operators defined on
polyhedral surfaces based on a variational formulation.