<div class="section abstract"><div class="htmlview paragraph">This paper examines a history of numerical methods for evaluating drawbeads in sheet metal forming, from early work with Dr. Sing Tang at the Ford Scientific Research Laboratory on special purpose drawbead simulation software, to modern general purpose software simulations incorporating analytic drawbeads in full 3D sheet forming analyses. Future directions in the field are explored through an example utilizing nonlinear optimization for drawbead design.</div></div>