Timeline
- 1452–1519 Leonardo da Vinci made many contributions
- 1638: Galileo Galilei published the book "Two New Sciences" in which he examined the failure of simple structures
- 1660: Hooke's law by Robert Hooke
- 1687: Isaac Newton published "Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica" which contains the Newton's laws of motion
- 1750: Euler–Bernoulli beam equation
- 1700–1782: Daniel Bernoulli introduced the principle of virtual work
- 1707–1783: Leonhard Euler developed the theory of buckling of columns
- 1826: Claude-Louis Navier published a treatise on the elastic behaviors of structures
- 1873: Carlo Alberto Castigliano presented his dissertation "Intorno ai sistemi elastici", which contains his theorem for computing displacement as partial derivative of the strain energy. This theorem includes the method of least work as a special case
- 1936: Hardy Cross' publication of the moment distribution method which was later recognized as a form of the relaxation method applicable to the problem of flow in pipe-network
- 1941: Alexander Hrennikoff submitted his D.Sc thesis in MIT on the discretization of plane elasticity problems using a lattice framework
- 1942: R. Courant divided a domain into finite subregions
- 1956: J. Turner, R. W. Clough, H. C. Martin, and L. J. Topp's paper on the "Stiffness and Deflection of Complex Structures" introduces the name "finite-element method" and is widely recognized as the first comprehensive treatment of the method as it is known today
Read more about this topic: Structural Engineering