“…These first studies attempted to predict tooth behaviour by developing highly complex differential equations, which required idealisations and large approximations of tooth geometries to solve. Similar work was reported decades later (Haack and Haft, 1972) and, at the same time, Davidian (1971) presented a simple linear-spring model, which was followed by the presentation of 2D analytical models (Thresher and Saito, 1973;Williams and Edmundson, 1984;Williams et al, 1986) and finally 3D models (Cobo et al, 1993;McGuinness et al, 1991;Tanne et al, 1987Tanne et al, , 1988Tanne et al, , 1991. With the development of numerical methods in the 1970s finite-difference (Haack and Haft, 1972) and finite element (FE) models (Widera et al, 1976) were formulated to facilitate research in dental biomechanics.…”