Frank L. Lewis

Control-theory textbook author at the University of Texas at Arlington, author of Applied Optimal Control and Estimation (Prentice-Hall, 1992).

Matters to this vault as one of two independent control-theory historians (with Stuart Bennett) who, writing separately, root the late-1950s turn to optimal control not in an extension of classical frequency-domain control but in a return to "the differential equation techniques of the late 1800's" — naming Lagrange and Hamilton's calculus of variations as the specific mathematics that makes writing the nonlinear equations of motion for optimal-control problems straightforward. His textbook is the vault's load-bearing Tier-2 source for that lineage alongside Bennett's.

References

• claim-bennett-lewis-trace-optimal-controls-root-to-lagrange-hamilton
• observation-rhw-docsub-feldbaum-bridge-meta-pairing-is-false-friend-lagrange-hamilton-ancestor