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At the risk of being immodest, together with my senior colleague, Professor A.E. Bryson, we wrote a best selling control theory and optimization text book 50 years ago. Today the book as still selling a few hundred copies per year without a revision (some typos and misprints were corrected in 1975 when a new publisher bought the copyright and issued a new printed version). There are also unknown number of Russian and Chinese translated version of our book being sold and in existence. The book attend the status of a Science Citation Classic and Google Scholar count of 17000+ citations. While I don’t have proof, I do not believe there exist another control textbook that has these distinctions. Anyhow, my colleagues in China decided to respond this year to the call of the International Federation Automatic Control (IFAC) for nomination of the IFAC best control textbook award. I thought this would be a fitting capstone for my senior colleague who is 93 years old. Imagine my surprise when according to IFAC rules that our textbook is disqualified for consideration because it is too old (they will only consider books published within the past ten years.) While I can understand this for an out-of-print book. But for a book still being used, referenced, and in print?

At this stage of our lives, another award is not important for Bryson and me, and I won’t comment on the decision to disqualify but only consider this to be a unique honor in our careers that few can claim.

Note added 1/7/2019.  Just to show this is not empty talk, Research Gate just informed me that for the week ending 1/6/2019, 45 persons read/cited our book "Applied Optimal Control"mentioned here (The site highest citation count for the week and 50 years after initial publication of the book).

Nlote added 2/18.2019.Research Gate just informed me that another 101 "reads" were added to the book last week and setting another record.

Note added 2/26/2019. Reseach Gate again notified me that our book was the most cited reference last week. I am delighted and somewhat surprised.