Memories from My Gainesville Days as a Student of R.E. Kalman [Historical Perspectives]

I graduated from the National Technical University of Athens in June of 1979. In the spring of 1979, shortly after I had expressed interest in joining Prof. Kalman's group at Gainesville, I met and was vetted by his former student Thanos Antoulas during one of Thanos' visits to Athens. I still have notes from that meeting, where I came to realize the beauty and breadth of the research program that I was soon going to be part of. I went to Gainesville in the fall of 1979 and was welcomed by fellow students Pramod Khargonekar, Bulent Ozguler, Jaime Ribera, and Erol Emre, who was R.E. Kalman's postdoc at the time. I met Prof. Kalman a month later when he returned to Gainesville from a trip. I distinctly recall that first meeting. After inquiring briefly about my own (limited at the time) research experience, he went on to discuss the importance of mathematics in engineering and science. He touched on modeling and how to discover structure from data as well as the fundamental role of minimality, both in the complexity of models as well as in our assumptions in developing them. Yet, with that in the background, he suggested that I take advanced algebra courses first, the importance of which became clear to me much later. From that point on, and for about a year, my interaction with Prof. Kalman was minimal. Apparently, he allowed time for osmosis to take place.