This collection of historically and technically important papers follows a logical line of development from early work in mathematical control theory to studies in adaptive control processes. The book touches upon all the major themes: stability theory, feedback control, time lag, prediction theory, dynamic programming, bang-bang control, and maximum principles.
The book opens with J. C. Maxwell's On Governors and continues with The Control of an Elastic Fluid by H. Bateman; an essay by editors Bellman and Kalaba, The Work of Lyapunov and Poincaré; Hurwitz's On the Conditions Under Which an Equation Has Only Roots With Negative Real Parts; Nyquist's Regeneration Theory; Feedback -- The History of an Idea by H. W. Bode; a paper on forced oscillations in a circuit by B. van der Pol; Self-excited Oscillations in Dynamical Systems Possessing Retarded Action by N. Minorsky; An Extension of Wiener's Theory of Prediction by Zadeh and Ragazzini; Time Optimal Control Systems by J. P. LaSalle; On the Theory of Optimal Processes by Boltyanskii, Gamkrelidze, and Pontryagin; Bellman's On the Application of the Theory of Dynamic Programming to the Study of Control Processes; and the editors' study Dynamic Programming and Adaptive Processes: Mathematical Foundation. Each paper is introduced with a brief account of its significance and with some suggestions for further reading.