Peter Peet Silvester (January 25, 1935 – October 11, 1996) was an electrical engineer who contributed to understanding of numerical analysis of electromagnetic fields and authored a standard textbook on the subject.
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.
[2] 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.
His book, Finite Elements for Electrical Engineering, written with Ron Ferrari, has been the only textbook on this specific topic for many years, and it has been translated into many languages, among which are Russian, Chinese, Japanese, and Spanish.