In 1943, R. Courant proposed breaking a continuum problem into triangular regions and replacing it with piecewise approximations within the triangles. Much of his work was ignored until engineers had independently developed it and coined the term Finite Element Method. The first known application of FEM took place at Boeing in 1953, where it was used to analyze the skin of a delta wing for stresses and displacements.

In the 1970's and early 1980s, packages such as ANSYS and NASTRAN were developed. They included many elements that could be used for static, dynamic and heat transfer analysis of mechanical s-v stems. In the mid-80's, as hardware and software for interactive graphics became available, packages with graphical input and wireframe CAD interface were introduced. Packages with elements for non-linear analysis were used to model contact problems such as media handling, gear contact, etc. and manufacturing processes such as metal forming etc. Software codes for optimization based on existing numerical techniques were introduced.

In the 1990's, focus has been on graphical user interfaces and portability between various software codes and two-way transferability between CAD packages and FEA packages is just around the comer. By year 2000, we may be able to see usable packages that have optimization subroutines for FEA based shape and parameter optimization.