Personal Impressions of the Dawn of Modern Control

For many, the dawn of modern control was the dramatic appearance at the first IFAC world congress (1960) of the papers by Boltyanski, Gamkrelidze, Mischenko, and Pontryagin on the maximum principle, by Bellman on dynamic programming and feedback control and by Kalman on the general theory of control systems. These, and related papers by the same authors, triggered a revolution in our subject that continues to this day. I joined Imperial College London in 1959 and was soon swept up into the excitement of this revolution. This essay traces my personal impressions of the dawn of modern control and its evolution, in a few selected areas with which I am familiar, into a mature and comprehensive subject; these impressions are personal and restricted, inevitably, by my ability to appreciate the whole picture. They hopefully give some idea of how the new ideas were received and developed but do not provide a complete picture and certainly fall far short of constituting, as the editors have emphasized, a history of this development. They should be regarded as the impressions of one participant in this exciting revolution.