On graduating twenty years back, in 1984, my first job was as a research engineer working on computational electromagnetics (CEM) at the National Institute for Aeronautical Systems Technology (as it was then called) of the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) in Pretoria, South Africa. It was an exciting time to be working in this field. Although a number of methods had already been successfully introduced, including the three which will be discussed in detail in this book, major advances were being made in all of these methods, and the power of desktop computers was growing in leaps and bounds. No commercial programs (or codes, as they are generally called) were then available for RF problems, but some US government-sponsored codes, in particular the NEC-2 code, were becoming available for general use.

The 1980s saw the final decade of the Cold War, which in some areas (such as Southern Africa) was far from cold. New military technologies, in particular stealth, were driving CEM to address progressively more electromagnetically complex problems. However, when the Cold War ended, far from CEM work coming to a halt, new commercial markets, such as the rapidly developing market in mobile telephony and personal communication systems, and the proliferation of electronic systems in motor vehicles, continued to drive the technology forward at breakneck speed throughout the 1990s. This was also due to the widespread availability of cheap and progressively more powerful personal computers as a crucial enabling technology.