Concepts is a software project in collaboration between ETH Zürich, TU Berlin and the Research Center Matheon.

On this page we give an overview to the history of the software project. A list of all current and former developers can be found here.

Authors and history of Concepts

The first version of the library was mainly written by Christian Lage. First versions and ideas of the software appeared already in his Ph.D. thesis. The version 1.4 was developed during his post doctoral studies at the Seminar for Applied Mathematics at ETH Zürich. The design ideas leading to this version are summarized in the technical report 1998-07.

Ana-Maria Matache was working with the hp-FEM part of Concepts. She implemented the quadrilaterals for 2D problems together with Christian during her Ph.D. thesis.

Gregor Schmidlin is working with the BEM part of Concepts.

In summer term 1999, David Hoch and Andreas Rüegg did a student research project on and with Concepts-1.4. They implemented mixed and variable boundary conditions for hp-FEM. Their work was supervised by Ana-Maria. After their project, David and Andreas continued to work on Concepts. They implemented an interface to the direct sparse solver SuperLU.

During winter term 1999/2000, Philipp Frauenfelder wrote his diploma thesis on and with Concepts. He implemented hp-DGFEM for second order PDE with constant coefficients and mixed and variable boundary conditions.

In winter term 2000/2001, Giacomo Catenazzi implemented linear elasticity in a somewhat more general way. At the same time, Andreas Rüegg wrote his diploma thesis about generalized FEM. David Hoch implemented non reflecting boundary conditions and time stepping schemes in Concepts for his diploma thesis.

In spring 2000, Philipp Frauenfelder started to work on 3D hp FEM.

In spring 2002, Kersten Schmidt started working on vector valued problems (with Maxwell equations in mind).

In summer term 2002, Manuel Walser designed and implemented time stepping schemes (in particular Newmark) for discretized problems. Norbert Fernandes designed and implemented an interface to the eigenvalue solver JdbSym.

In winter term 2002/2003, Christoph Winkelmann and Adrian Burri used Concepts to solve non-linear convection-diffusion problems using a finite volume discontinuous Galerkin scheme. During their work, the timestepping classes where improved considerably.

In early 2003, Radu Todor started using Concepts to solve stochastic PDEs.

Since 2011 Kersten Schmidt heads a junior research group at TU Berlin. His student assistants Robert Gruhlke and Christian Heier have implemented interfaces to Matlab and the eigenvalue solver Arpack++. Kersten's Ph.D. student Dirk Klindworth uses Concepts in his project on photonic crystal wave-guides, and Anastasia Thöns-Zueva, a postdoc in Kersten's group, uses Concepts in her research on acoustic equations. In late 2012 Adrien Semin joined Kersten's group as postdoc. He implemented an interface to MUMPS, a parallel sparse direct solver.