In the late 1950s, FENG Kang from the Institute of Mathematics (now the Academy of Mathematics and Systems Science) proposed a systematic numerical method for solving partial differential equations that was based on research and practice related to solving computational problems for large dam construction.

This method—called "Finite difference method based on variation principle" at the time and currently called the "Finite element method"—has been widely used in scientific and engineering computation. It is regarded as a major achievement in modern computational mathematics by the international mathematics community.