Modern Control Engineering

It took nearly another 150 years and two world wars for the full nature of Control Systems to become understood. (Assuming that we do now understand them!) The key points are that in order to control a system you need three things. 

  1. You need information on its present state.
  2. You need to be able to transmit this information to your controller.
  3. You need to be able use this information to predict the future behaviour of the system.  

Hence, the development of sophisticated control systems only became possible after communications engineering and information engineering had become established and these in turn make use of aspects mathematics that had been considered to be completely academic and of no practical importance in the 19th century. The founders of modern control engineering have therefore included mathematicians, communication engineers and information scientists. There can probably be a lot of debate about who the important founders really are, but my selection is as follows:  

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