A.A. Andronov and the development of Soviet control engineering

Control engineering saw rapid development in many countries in the period immediately following World War II. Engineers and scientists concerned with control problems formed new professional groupings; university courses in the subject began to be offered; and research groups were set up in industrial, academic, and government laboratories. Hitherto secret wartime work was widely disseminated, and new military, industrial, and other applications of the emerging discipline were identified. Aleksandr Aleksandrovich Andronov (1901-1952) was a key figure in the development of control engineering in the former Soviet Union during this period, yet his name and his contributions to control theory and nonlinear dynamics are much less well known in the West than they deserve. The aim of this article is to give a brief introduction to Andronov's work, concentrating on his background in nonlinear dynamics, and his subsequent role in stimulating Soviet research into control engineering-most significantly in the wake of the founding of his Moscow seminar on the topic in 1944.