Geared toward advanced undergraduate and graduate engineering students, this text introduces the theory and applications of optimal control. It serves as a bridge to the technical literature, enabling students to evaluate the implications of theoretical control work, and to judge the merits of papers on the subject.
Rather than presenting an exhaustive treatise, Optimal Control offers a detailed introduction that fosters careful thinking and disciplined intuition. It develops the basic mathematical background, with a coherent formulation of the control problem and discussions of the...

Control theory represents an attempt to codify, in mathematical terms, the principles and techniques used in the analysis and design of control systems. Algebraic geometry may, in an elementary way, be viewed as the study of the structure and properties of the solutions of systems of algebraic equations. The aim of these notes is to provide access to the methods of algebraic geometry for engineers and applied scientists through the motivated context of control theory. I began the development of these notes over fifteen years ago with a series of lectures given to the Control Group at the Lund...