The central issue of this thesis is the development of a discrete Laplace--Beltrami operator on digital surfaces. These surfaces come from the theory of discrete geometry, i.e. geometry that focuses on subsets of relative integers. We place ourselves here in a theoretical framework where digital surfaces are the result of an approximation, or discretization process, of an underlying smooth surface. This method makes it possible both to prove theorems of convergence of discrete quantities towards continuous quantities, but also, through numerical analyses, to experimentally confirm these results. For the discretization of the operator, we face two problems: on the one hand, our surface is only an approximation of the underlying continuous surface, and on the other hand, the trivial estimation of geometric quantities on the digital surface does not generally give us a good estimate of this quantity. We already have answers to the second problem: in recent years, many articles have focused on developing methods to approximate certain geometric quantities on digital surfaces (such as normals or curvature), methods that we will describe in this thesis. These new approximation techniques allow us to inject measurement information into the elements of our surface. We therefore use the estimation of normals to answer the first problem, which in fact allows us to accurately approximate the tangent plane at a point on the surface and, through an integration method, to overcome topological problems related to the discrete surface. We present a theoretical convergence result of the discretized new operator, then we illustrate its properties using a numerical analysis of it. We carry out a detailed comparison of the new operator with those in the literature adapted on digital surfaces, which allows, at least for convergence, to show that only our operator has this property. We also illustrate the operator via some of these applications such as its spectral decomposition or the mean curvature flow.