My Stanford Days as a Graduate Student with R.E. Kalman [Historical Perspectives]

I started my graduate studies at Stanford University during the autumn quarter of 1967, after having obtained the bachelor's degree in electrical engineering from the Georgia Institute of Technology in 1967. For me, the biggest shift in going from undergraduate student to graduate study at Stanford was the level of mathematics. In particular, the system theory course sequence in electrical engineering at Stanford required that students have a strong understanding and working knowledge of linear algebra, which I did not begin to acquire until the spring quarter of 1969 when I took a linear algebra course in the Department of Mathematics. After that course, I was finally able to take System Theory 363A, the first course in Stanford's electrical engineering system theory sequence at that time. I took the course from a remarkable adjunct professor named Rod Edwards who "turned me on" to mathematical system theory as an area of study. In the next quarter, I took the first course of a two-course sequence in the Department of Operations Research titled Mathematical System Theory 347A and B, which was taught by Prof. R.E. Kalman.