Haphazard Remarks on What I Recall about the Field of Control in the 1960's
This brief note providesasnapshot of what research and education in control was like for one of its practitioners in the period 1960-1970. It is impressionistic in the loosest possible sense of the word, focusing as it does on the personal experiences of author and those ofafew others whose paths overlapped.
R.BROCKETT
Control education, stability theory, linear systems control history, US was to be competitive, more scientists and engineers were needed and that fellowship money would address the shortfall. My graduate education was supported byanewly enacted National Defense Education Act which provided three years of tuition plusastipend to study in the Systems Research Center at Case Institute of Technology, then headed by Donald Eckman. Graduate course work involved classes on classical control, numerical control, sampled data systems, estimation and filtering, automata theory, probability, differential equations, and functional analysis. The actual selection of courses was shaped by some combination of departmental rules, advisor's taste and the advice of the older students. Ph.D degrees in engineering were issued without designatingaspecialty but when necessary I was consideredastudent in mechanical engineering. I was fortunate to work under the guidance ofanewly hired faculty member, Mike Mesarovic,aphilosophically minded mentor with an appreciation for major trends. I found out rather quickly that my thesis work would benefit from learning more mathematics and this influenced my course selection. My peers and I at Case were encouraged to go to the leading control conference of the period, the Joint Automatic Control Conference (JACC). At that time the JACC was held inauniversity campus, Columbia in 1962, followed by Minnesota, Rensselaer and Stanford. At the first of these, I heard lectures on the maximum principle, Liapunov methods, stochastic approximation, the use of Minkowski's inequalities to solve optimization problems. For me, these were new and exciting topics, coming along atatime when I was quite impressionable and not very critical. In addition to encouraging conference participation, the faculty at
English
|
