Jerrold E. Marsden

American applied mathematician (1942–2010), a central figure in geometric mechanics and symplectic/variational integrators, long at Caltech after earlier posts at Berkeley and Princeton; co-author of standard texts on classical mechanics and nonlinear dynamics.

Matters to this vault as co-author, with Sina Ober-Blöbaum and Oliver Junge, of the Discrete Mechanics and Optimal Control (DMOC) convergence analysis proving that a symplectic-partitioned-Runge-Kutta discrete adjoint/costate recursion converges to the continuous Pontryagin adjoint system as step size → 0, under stated smoothness and coercivity hypotheses (claim-ober-blobaum-junge-marsden-prove-discrete-adjoint-converges-to-continuous) — a lineage that arrives at the same discrete/continuous-adjoint question as the Kelley/Bryson-to-backpropagation thread, but from geometric mechanics rather than from neural-network history.

This vault has not independently read Marsden's broader body of work; everything here rests on the single 2008/2011 DMOC paper read for this capture.

References

• claim-ober-blobaum-junge-marsden-prove-discrete-adjoint-converges-to-continuous