(For new reader and those who request 好友请求, please read my 公告栏 first) 

In 1999, the Triennial World Congress of my profession (The International  Federation  of Automatic Control, IFAC) was taking place for the first time in Beijing China. China was the  host country and went to great length to stage the event. I was given the honor of delivering  a plenary address to this World Congress and spent a great deal of time preparing for  this talk which more or less represented my lifetime contribution to the subject. 15 years later, I happento re-visit the material I prepared for this talk and found them to be  still relevant, fairly current, and suitable for a general educated audience (people with a bachelor degree in science and engineering and interested in the idea of OPTIMIZATION).

There are three documents associated with this talk (all three attached here:

1. A PowerPoint document with animation consistingof all the slides used in the  talk. The document is in English.

   Chinese IFAC talk - Copy.ppt

2. A companion PowerPoint document whichis a Chinese translation of #1 slide by slide. This was shown using two screens simultaneously synchronized  during the plenary lecture.

   IFAC99 v.ns.ppt

3. A  text version of the plenary lecture that was given at the 1999 IFAC  Congress  by the author. By viewing the slides with their companying text, one can get an approximation of the spoken lecture. An even better way is  to print out the text and step through the presentation with  the animation feature using the slide presentation mode of the  PPT. Using the Next and the Previous keys (or the forward and backward arrow keys)  for forward or backward animation step (also indicated in appropriate places in the text), one can simulate the actual  lecture. Since this lecture is  primarily of an informal survey nature, we  emphasize conceptual unification and understanding rather than scholarly exactness or mathematical rigor. It is suitable for a general scientific  audience.

   IFAC talk script.doc

Actually, there also exista CD disk that automates the step #3 with my voice recorded and published by Xian Jiaotong University 西安交大出皈社.  But I am not sure the CD is still available in print  at this point. Thus, one way to“listen” to this lecture is to print out #1, #2, and #2 and follow  the  suggestion above. (Warning: it may take entire 2 hours to digest the lecture this way. But I believe it should be worth the effort for those who are interested even 15 years later.)

Note added 1/16/2014: I just found out that the animation feature of the English PPT document is not working while the Chinese version is OK. Please give me time to fix it.