- Long Chen has written a short package (Chen, Bisection, 2006) of AFEM for elliptic partial differential equations in early 2006 and successfully used it to teach graduate students in 2006 summer school at the Peking University.
- In late 2006, Chensong Zhang and Long Chen improved it into a more completed package for two dimensional elliptic problems: AFEM@matlab (Chen and Zhang, AFEM@matlab, 2006), which has already been used in several recent publications and downloaded over thousands times. See MATLAB database.
- iFEM is an evolution and improvement of AFEM@matlab. It is different in several aspects: the data structure is updated and constructed more efficiently, the main subroutines are rewritten with new data structure to improve the efficiency, and three dimensional mesh adaptation is also included. The main components were finished in late 2007 and early 2008.
- The author would like to thank Professor Michael Holst in University of California at San Diego for the discussion on the data structure for three dimensional mesh refinement and finite element computation, Professor Ludmil Zikatanov in Pennsylvania State University for the discussion on the usage of sparse matrix in the data structure, and also Dr. Chensong Zhang in Pennsylvania State University for the effort in the development of AFEM@matlab, the early version of iFEM.
- Very recently Funken, Praetorius, and Wissgott provide an efficient implementation of adaptive P1 finite element method in two dimensions in MATLAB. Our package is developed independently (see the first three items on the evolution of iFEM). More importantly, our package includes adaptive finite element in three dimensions which is much harder than that in two dimensions.
