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Three works of mine that stood the test of time

Because of the availability of Research Gate, nowadays an author knows immediately when his past work has been referenced. Scholarly work that are continuously being referenced/cited after more than 50+ years can certainly claim to have stood the test of time. In my own case, there are three:

1. The “controllability” paper with Kalman in 1961 published in an obscure conference proceeding that became a cornerstone of “modern control system theory”. There is actually quite a story behind how this paper came about. But that must wait for another time.

2. The 1963 “Bayesian Approach  to Estimation” paper which among other things for the first time explains Kalman Filter within a decision-theoretic and Probability framework. The paper also unified other estimation work such as nonlinear filtering in the same framework. Subsequently, I became the namer, explainer,  and early proponent  of the “Kalman Filter”. Kalman personally acknowledged his mentor and myself in his Draper Prize acceptance speech in 1988 See ?mod=space&uid=1565&do=blog&id=14253 .

3. My 1969 control text book “Applied Optimal control” co-authored with Bryson and translated into Chinese and Russian which after 50+ years is still selling and being cited over 28,000 times according to Google Scholar.

My researches into differential games as extension of control theory during the 70s, while they are still being referenced have not quite reached the 50 year mark. But I hope to live to see it.  Lastly, my latest research endeavor on “Ordinal Optimization” done during the last 30 years and considered to be my most practically useful work won’t qualify until 2041. I won’t live to see it. That’s life! But I am not complaining.