It’s funny, I also found this inspiring and thoughtful but for almost the exact opposite reason. I never feel overwhelmed (not that I’d like to), and feel like I’m letting life pass by while I do meaningless crap. I don’t want to work for the sake of work, I want to do great work because of the enjoyment it brings me to learn cool things and work on complex systems. I don’t want to waste more time on Reddit, I want to spend that time on a hobby, or exercise, or learning something.
I agree. I recently starting contributing to an open source project, really enjoy the feeling of contributing and interacting with other passionate contributors and maintainers.
I don't really get to interact, except with a few users. For me, it's the idea that u actually built something useful, it's my own idea, and I have full ownership of it.
At my day job, the expectation are vague, I have no real power, the people who do can't answer my questions intelligently, and at the end it's like I did some miniscule part of a system that works just OK, but not up to my standards.
Very nice summary paper on FEM! FEM has now become a key part of any physical product development process. I used to work in FEM area and few years back switched to unrelated software domains - so felt a bit of nostalgia reading the paper. Thanks for posting !
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.
