Boundary Integral Equations - A Personal View

Abstract

My first exposure to what were best known then as potential methods was around the 1965-1966 academic year at the University of Washington in Seattle, Washington. I had been a stress analyst at The Boeing Company, working on the US's version of the Supersonic Transport, which was properly fated for many reasons never to be built and fly. As a stress analyst, I made extensive use of a mechanical calculator. I shared it with two other stress analysts, along with my very important stress books led, of course, by Roark’s famous volume of stress results for beams, plates, shells, and the like. I watched in envy as other engineers in the methods area gathered their computer output and punched cards each morning to continue the very first development of automated stress analysis methods for aircraft design (the Boeing 737 aircraft was to be that first design done by the finite element method not too long after this time). There were two types of computer algorithms that were still competing for this first design task -- the force method and the displacement method. The force method derived from efficient hand analysis methods developed by Civil Engineers for analyzing complex redundant structures....