Summary: Since the beginning of the industrial revolution control engineering has been a key technology in many technical fields. James Watt’s centrifugal governor for steam engines is one of the early examples of an extremely successful controller concept, of which at the end of the 1860s approximately 75 000 devices were in use only in England. Around this time, motivated by the increasing complexity of the plants that had to be controlled, engineers started to investigate systematically the theoretical foundations of control theory. The dynamic behavior of controlled systems, however, can only be understood and advanced with the help of mathematics, or as Werner von Siemens formulated: “Without mathematics you are always in the dark.”
For the entire collection see [Zbl 1194.00075].