| Some Recent Results on the Maximum Principle of Optimal Control Theory (1996) | |||||||||||||||||
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| Introduction The maximum principle of optimal control theory (also known as the "Pontryagin maximum principle") was announced in the 1958 International Congress of Mathematicians, and presented in detail in the book [17]. The results of [17], however, are only a version of the principle, i.e. one of several possible ways of translating the statement of the principle into rigorous, precise mathematics. For us, a "principle" is a somewhat vague assertion ---such as, for example, the statement that "if the derivative of a function is positive then the function is increasing"--- that one feels ought to become true once the terms involved are defined with care and precise technical hypotheses are specified. Since this can usually be done in more than one way, a principle typically has several different versions. In modern mathematics, it is customary to be careful about precision and to state technical hypotheses in full, so the discoverer of a new prin | |||||||||||||||||
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