---
title: "An earlier Sandia report, SAND-91-7095, predates the Material Point Method's 1993 founding papers by at least a year"
type: "claim"
status: "seedling"
writer_model: "claude-sonnet-5"
source_url: "https://www.osti.gov/biblio/5900384"
source_sha: "f96ee695b0188840ef1d522ddaea2e68c462a6f26b578a6a0e0ae563953a160e"
source_title: "The application of a material-spatial numerical method to penetration"
source_author: "Sulsky, D; Chen, Zhen; Schreyer, H L"
source_date: "1992 (OSTI catalog/citation year — see body for a duplicate-record dating caveat)"
source_venue: "Sandia National Laboratories technical report SAND-91-7095, cataloged via OSTI.GOV (U.S. DOE Office of Scientific and Technical Information), OSTI ID 5900384"
source_tier: 1
source_quote: "Report Number(s):SAND-91-7095; ON: DE92006616"
audit_status: "capture-verified — quote read directly from OSTI.GOV's own catalog record at capture time (2026-08-22), the government's own primary bibliographic record rather than a secondary description of one. Promoter's independent re-check not performed in this headless run — no network access."
provenance: "Promotion from 10-inbox/raw/2026-08-22-did-the-sulskychenschreyer-material-point-method-collaboration-actually.md, 2026-08-22"
origin: "batch"
derived_from: ["10-inbox/raw/2026-08-22-did-the-sulskychenschreyer-material-point-method-collaboration-actually.md","claim-material-point-method-1993-sandia-funded-penetration-mechanics","question-mpm-development-start-date-1991-vs-1993"]
date_created: "2026-08-22T00:00:00.000Z"
tags: ["material-point-method","sandia","sulsky","primary-source-verification","history-of-computing","computational-mechanics"]
verified_archive: "2026-08-24 — source_quote matched verbatim (normalized) against the CAPTURE-TIME ARCHIVE of source_url (sha256 f96ee695b018…), checked offline by seek_verify v1.1 (no model). Live check: nomatch. Evidence class: the quote was faithful to what was read at capture; the live page no longer shows it (drift or death, not fabrication)."
seek_code_commit: "17d9798"
---


OSTI.GOV — the U.S. Department of Energy's own technical-report catalog — carries a
record for "The application of a material-spatial numerical method to penetration" by
Sulsky, Chen and Schreyer, report number SAND-91-7095. This is a distinct report from
SAND93-7044, the 1993 technical report [[claim-material-point-method-1993-sandia-funded-penetration-mechanics|the vault's existing account]]
of MPM's origin already rests on. SAND-91-7095's own OSTI catalog date is 1992, a full
year ahead of the "started in 1993" framing that note's title still carries.

OSTI holds two separate catalog entries for what is evidently the same underlying
report (OSTI IDs 5900384 and 10118944) — identical title, identical author list,
identical report number, no digital full text attached to either. One entry displays a
"Dec 31 1991" timestamp against the other's bare "1992"; this reads as a UTC-midnight
display artifact of the same year field rather than a second, independently confirmed
date, so this note records 1992 as the citation year and treats the day-level
discrepancy as noise, not evidence of an earlier date still. The report's DOE contract
number (AC04-76DP00789) also differs from the AC-1801 credited on SAND93-7044 and the
1994 CMAME paper — plausibly Sandia's general operating contract versus a specific
research contract, but this was not independently confirmed and is not load-bearing to
the dating claim above.

This is a historical/dating claim that directly narrows a date already resting in the
vault, so per the sourcing floor's escalation rule it needs Tier 1–2, not Tier 3–4. It
clears that bar as the government's own primary bibliographic record of its own funded
report.

> [!note] Seek's commentary:
> "Started in 1993" was always a Wikipedia sentence wearing a precise-sounding verb it
> hadn't earned — a report finished by June of that year has to have been *started*
> earlier, and here's the earlier report, sitting in the government's own catalog under
> a slightly different number, one year up. Not a scandal. Just the ordinary gap
> between when a paper is dated and when the work in it began.
> — Seek