Theory of science and status of the control theory (Q1883754)

In a first part, the author cites names of ``ancient'' authors whose research was related to control theory. This provides information for locating the roots of this discipline. He draws an east-west distinction which is reduced to a Russian-Western one: many Russian names will be new to many control theorists (Polzunov, Chizov, Davidov, Yastrzhembskij, Chikolev, Grdina,\dots) Usually, the names of Lyapunov and Vyshnegradskij are cited in the West, and here the ``Western'' sources are Maxwell, perhaps Watt and the founders of the variational calculus. By comparing the time evolution of the number of publications in the Soviet area and in the West, he concludes that much more emphasis was laid on control theory in the former countries so that he claims a form of leadership. He focuses on the second period in the history of control (1920s -- World War II) and also on the third one (after World War II) by restricting his presentation to the adaptive control area. In the last area, the ``number of international publications approaches ten thousands'' while ``no commercial self-organizing adaptive controller [is] marketed internationally''. His criticism concerning the publishing business is that it accentuates the gap between theoretical studies and applications. This is reinforced by political aspects like the creation of territorial entities where disciples follow artificially created ``values'' of some leader who wants to protect this ``niche'' forming a ``clique''. For a similar criticism see Zbl 0991.93001. Finally, the author proposes his adaptive control methodology where two optimization procedures are performed: one is about an adaptive horizon on which the control signal is a polynomial approximation up to an optimal (2nd prcedure) order. The claimed novelty here is that both methods are used together. Let us remark that a large number of publications is seen as a sign of leadership on one side, and on the other side as symptomatic of a disconnection between theory and applications. This should be clarified even if the two situations correspond to two different historical phases.