I joined imechanica almost a year ago and I've been frequently following its interesting discussions, even the most animated ones. I think that a place like this is ideal to foster the exchange of ideas in the scientific community;

Moreover it is fantastic as a simple student like me can interact and easily ask questions to the most important researcher in the field of mechanics.

Hence, I thought it would have been the right place to pose a question which I believe is quite controversial. The debate I would like to open is about the future of meshless methods, are they still valid? It is worth to keep investigation in this area?

An overview on meshfree approximation schemes that I recently posted can be found here. Following Zhigang's note indicating the limited accessibility of blogspot.com, a local version of the article is also provided. I am also attaching a PDF version of the html file. The conversion was done using PDF Online. An article that provides more details is also available online. JAVA applets for plotting basis functions can also be accessed [1D] [2D] [3D].