Peter P. Silvester

Who was Peter P. Silvester?

Peter Peet Silvester was an electrical engineer who contributed to understanding of numerical analysis of electromagnetic fields and authored a standard textbook on the subject.

Silvester was born in Tallinn, Estonia. He graduated from the Camegie Institute of Technology in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, in 1956. After a period of industrial practice, he continued his studies at the University of Toronto, obtaining the MASc in 1958, and then at McGill University, where he was awarded the PhD in Electrical Engineering, in 1964. He initially joined the Department of Electrical Engineering at McGill as Lecturer, then as Assistant Professor, Associate Professor, and Full Professor. In 1996, he was honored with the titles of emeritus professor at McGill University, and Honorary Professor at the University of British Columbia.

Silvester devoted a large part of his career to the numerical analysis of electromagnetic field], with applications to magnetics, microwaves, geomagnetics, antennas, and bioelectricity. His main research focused on the finite element method, as applied to electromagnetics, where he was a pioneer. His paper, Finite-Element Solution of Homogeneous-Waveguide Problems, presented at the 1968 URSI Symposium on Electromagnetic Waves, and later on, published in the Italian technical journal, Alta Frequenza, was definitely the first FEM application to electronic engineering.