Walter Murray Wonham

Walter Murray Wonham FRSC (1934 – May 14, 2023) was a Canadian control theorist and professor at the University of Toronto. He focused on multi-variable geometric control theory, stochastic control and stochastic filters, and the control of discrete event systems from the standpoint of mathematical logic and formal languages.

W. Murray Wonham

FRSC
Wonham in 2015
Born
Walter Murray Wonham

1934
Montreal, Quebec, Canada
Died (aged 88)
Toronto, Ontario, Canada
EducationMcGill University (BEng)
University of Cambridge (PhD)
Known forLinear Multivariable Control,[1] Supervisory control theory, Internal Model Principle, Pole Assignment Theorem[2]
AwardsIEEE Control Systems Award (1987)
Brouwer Medal (1990)
Giorgio Quazza Medal (2020)
Scientific career
FieldsControl theory
InstitutionsUniversity of Toronto
Doctoral advisorJohn Coales
Websitehttps://www.control.utoronto.ca/~wonham/

Education

Wonham attended a boys' school and preferred individual to team sports, taking up sailing and tennis. He obtained his bachelor's degree in engineering physics from McGill University in 1956 and a doctorate in stochastic control from the University of Cambridge in 1961.[3]

Career

In the 1960s, he worked at Purdue University's Control and Information Systems Laboratory, Martin Marietta's Research Institute for Advanced Studies (RIAS) in Baltimore, Brown University's Department of Applied Mathematics, and in the Office for Control Theory and Applications of NASA's Electronics for Research Center, where he developed a geometric theory of multivariable control with A. Stephen Morse.[3] In 1968, Wonham proved a separation theorem for controls in a more general cost functional class with many technical assumptions and restrictions.[4]

Wonham returned to Canada in 1970, after fifteen years away, and joined the University of Toronto as an associate professor in the Faculty of Electrical Engineering. Being with the university's Control Theory Group as a full professor since 1972, he served as Dean of Engineering and Applied Sciences at the University of Toronto between 1992 and 1996. He was made university professor in 1996 and appointed University Professor Emeritus upon his retirement in 2000.[3]

Wonham and his student Bruce Francis first articulated the internal model principle in 1976, which is a good regulator restricted to the ordinary differential equations subset of control theory.[5] As an explicit formulation of the Conant and Ashby good regulator theorem,[6] it stands in contrast to classical control where the classical feedback loop fails to explicitly model the controlled system (although the classical controller may contain an implicit model). In 1987, Wonham and Peter Ramadge introduced supervisory control theory as a method for automatically synthesizing supervisors that restrict the behavior of a plant such that as much as possible of the given specifications are fulfilled.[7]

Wonham authored and co-authored about seventy-five research papers, as well as the book Linear Multivariable Control: A Geometric Approach. He was a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada and the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE).[8] He was an Honorary Professor of the Beijing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics and a Foreign Member of the (U.S.) National Academy of Engineering.[9]

Death

Wonham died on May 14, 2023, at the age of 88.[10]

Selected works

References
  1. Wonham, W. M. (December 23, 1985). Linear Multivariable Control: A Geometric Approach. Springer-Verlag – via www.springer.com.
  2. Wonham, W. M. (February 1967). "Data" (PDF). ntrs.nasa.gov. Retrieved 2019-12-23.
  3. "University Professor Emeritus W. Murray Wonham – Past & Future | Electrical & Computer Engineering". www.ece.utoronto.ca.
  4. Murray Wonham (1968). "On the separation theorem of stochastic control". SIAM J. Control. 6 (2): 312–326. doi:10.1137/0306023.
  5. B. A. Francis and W. M. Wonham, "The internal model principle of control theory", Automatica 12 (1976) 457–465.
  6. Roger C. Conant and W. Ross Ashby, "Every good regulator of a system must be a model of that system", International Journal of Systems Science vol 1 (1970), 89–97.
  7. Ramadge, Peter J.; Wonham, Walter M. (January 1987). "Supervisory Control of a Class of Discrete Event Processes". SIAM Journal on Control and Optimization. 25 (1): 206–230. doi:10.1137/0325013.
  8. "List of fellows of IEEE Control Systems Society". December 22, 2019 – via Wikipedia.
  9. Biography on IEEE Xplore Digital Library
  10. "Walter Murray Wonham". The Globe and Mail. Retrieved June 11, 2023 – via Legacy.com.
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