Why Worry About Singularities?
A mathematician delivered a keynote presentation at an engineering conference some years ago. At the coffee break, following the presentation, a highly respected senior developer of a legacy finite element code, remarked: “I do not understand why the speaker was so worried about singularities. We never see them.”
The remark highlights the lack of a common language between the pre-scientific notion of finite element modeling and finite element analysis, which is a branch of applied mathematics. Read why mathematicians and engineers alike should “worry” about singularities.