This book may be regarded as consisting of two parts. In Chapters I-IV we pre- sent what we regard as essential topics in an introduction to deterministic optimal control theory. This material has been used by the authors for one semester graduate-level courses at Brown University and the University of Kentucky. The simplest problem in calculus of variations is taken as the point of departure, in Chapter I. Chapters II, III, and IV deal with necessary conditions for an opti- mum, existence and regularity theorems for optimal controls, and the method of dynamic programming. The beginning...