In Control, Almost from the Beginning Until the Day After Tomorrow

摘要

I entered the field of control as a Ph.D. student in September 1965, over 40 years ago. A couple of years before, Roger Brockett and Michael Athans had joined the Electrical Engineering faculty of MIT. They introduced Modern Control Theory, as the state space approach was called then, as a research activity and had set up a graduate curriculum in this area. In my first semester, I took courses on optimal control a la Pontryagin and on the state space theory of systems. This last course was given for the first time at MIT. On the West Coast of the US, similar courses existed already a few years earlier. Later, I taught this course myself many many times. It became my favorite subject.