O.C. Zienkiewicz is Professor Emeritus at the Civil and Computational Engineering Centre, University of Wales Swansea, UK and holds the UNESCO Chair of Numerical Methods in Engineering at the Technical University of Catalunya, Spain. R.L. Taylor is a Professor in the Graduate School, Department of Civil Engineering and Environmental Engineering at the University of California, Berkeley, USA. J. Z Zhu is Senior Scientist at ESI US R & D Inc., USA.