I am unaware of any effort in that direction, but I did find a 1987 paper by Höllig [1] that seems to do a kind of converse (approximates FEM solutions using s

I am unaware of any effort in that direction, but I did find a 1987 paper by Höllig [1] that seems to do a kind of converse (approximates FEM solutions using splines. I haven't read the paper, but that's my quick take). Recovering splines using a FEM might be an interesting learning exercise, since the analytic solution is known and the model seems simple. The motivating physical model is described by flat splines [2], and Carl de Boor has photographs of physical splines in action [3]. [1] https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/Finite-element-methods-with-B-splines-Höllig/aa9f8256ed0f334882f597d7771837c6ecd605e0 https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/Finite-element-methods... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flat_spline https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flat_spline [3] https://pages.cs.wisc.edu/~deboor/draftspline.html https://pages.cs.wisc.edu/~deboor/draftspline.html