I just skimmed this and I never worked in FEM but this really brought me back. I had the pleasure of meeting several of the people in the article (Hughes, Oden, Babuska, Demkowicz) and couldn’t help feeling some nostalgia as well.
Great! Hughes, Oden and Babuška are three of my heroes. My work is in FEM, specifically, the theory of Mixed Finite Elements and Eigenalue problems, to which both Babuška made important contributions. Oden I know from elasticity for the most part.
I was lucky enough to have taken two FEA classes from Hughes in the 80s. I worked with his DLEARN [1] code many times back then. He was a great teacher.
I never had the pleasure of taking classes from Juan Carlos Simo, but he was known to have outstanding classes. His was a very brilliant light & life cut too short by cancer at the young age of 42.
