History
While it is difficult to quote a date of the invention of the finite element method, the method originated from the need to solve complex elasticity and structural analysis problems in civil and aeronautical engineering. Its development can be traced back to the work by A. Hrennikoff and R. Courant. Although the approaches used by these pioneers are different, they share one essential characteristic: mesh discretization of a continuous domain into a set of discrete sub-domains, usually called elements.
Hrennikoff's work discretizes the domain by using a lattice analogy, while Courant's approach divides the domain into finite triangular subregions to solve second order elliptic partial differential equations (PDEs) that arise from the problem of torsion of a cylinder. Courant's contribution was evolutionary, drawing on a large body of earlier results for PDEs developed by Rayleigh, Ritz, and Galerkin.
The finite element method obtained its real impetus in the 1960s and 70s by the developments of J.H. Argyris and co-workers at the University of Stuttgart, R.W. Clough and co-workers at UC Berkeley, and O.C. Zienkiewicz and co-workers at the University of Swansea. Further impetus was provided in these years by available open source finite element software programs. NASA sponsored the original version of NASTRAN, and UC Berkeley made the finite element program SAP IV widely available. A rigorous mathematical basis to the finite element method was provided in 1973 with the publication by Strang and Fix. The method has since been generalized for the numerical modeling of physical systems in a wide variety of engineering disciplines, e.g., electromagnetism, heat transfer, and fluid dynamics; see O.C. Zienkiewicz, R.L.Taylor, and J.Z. Zhu, and K.J. Bathe.
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