A Brief History of Computational Electromagnetics in Microwave Engineering—A Personal Retrospective

Abstract

As the MTT-Society is celebrating seventy years of existence – an age approaching the average human lifespan – the number of members who witnessed the early years of microwave engineering is slowly declining. While their achievements and contributions are well documented, less is known about their perceptions and personal experiences of living through the evolutionary stages of our Society. Yet, this experience is valuable in understanding how and why new ideas and methodologies evolve, survive initial rejection, achieve acceptance, and then either persist or give way to new developments. This personal and hence, subjective retrospective of computational electromagnetics in microwave engineering reflects on the synergy between the evolution of field-theoretical and algorithmic developments, computing science and technology, and microwave technology, particularly during the first decades of the MTT-Society. It also highlights several personal experiences and interactions that have spawned new ideas and initiatives, and thus contributed to the present state of the art in computational electromagnetics.

Keywords

• Computational electromagnetics
• electromagnetic field theory
• numerical methods
• frequency domain modeling
• time domain modeling
• microwave circuits