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The articles of this volume will not be indexed individually. The book presents five expository contributions on a broad range of topics fundamental to past, present and future intellectual endeavors in the area of control of distributed parameter systems. In the first article, J. L. Lions considers pointwise control of distributed parameter systems and discusses a number of fundamental concepts including regularity, exact controllability using the now well- known Hilbert uniqueness method technique, and optimality systems for both parabolic and hyperbolic systems. Pointwise actuator (sensor systems lead to unbounded input) unbounded output control and estimation problems which have become important in recent years. Both bounded and unbounded sensors and actuators play a role in the second article by M. C. Delfour and M. P. Polis. They focus on hyperbolic systems and survey a number of open questions related to mathematical modelling in comparing sensors and actuators acting at a point or on the boundary versus distributed sensors and control. Robustness and stabilization schemes including the destabilization effect of delays in boundary feedback are discussed. In the third article J. S. Gibson and A. Adamian consider a particular stabilization scheme, the linear quadratic regulator feedback control design, for a distributed model of a flexible beam attached to a rotating rigid hub. They present a numerical study of three Ritz-Galerkin approximation schemes to compute functional feedback gains. These are obtained by combining optimal state estimator gains with state feedback control gains. The fourth article by D. L. Russell is an overview discussion of damping models for flexible structures. Several well-known beam damping models as air or viscous damping, Kelvin-Voigt damping, structural damping including the square root of damping operator are considered. The spatial hysteresis damping model is discussed too. The fifth article by Ruth F. Curtain presents frequency domain techniques to state-space or time domain approaches for infinite-dimensional systems. The so-called Callier-Desoer transfer function class and the Pritchard-Salaman class of state space systems are discussed. The book includes a long list of references (about 400) related to the considered topics.