Jan Camiel Willems

January Camiel Willems ( born September 18, 1939 in Bruges, † August 31, 2013 ) was a Belgian mathematical system theorist.

Willems studied at the University of Ghent and the University of Rhode Iceland and in 1968 at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Roger W. Brockett received his doctorate in electrical engineering ( Nonlinear harmonic analysis). Then he was there until 1973 Assistant Professor and from 1973 Professor of Systems and Control Theory at the University of Groningen, where he became Professor Emeritus in 2003. After that, he was a visiting professor at the Catholic University of Leuven.

In 1972 he introduced the concept of dissipative dynamical systems in systems theory and developed in the 1990s, he mentioned a Behavioral Approach approach to systems and control theory.

Willems was editor of the SIAM Journal of Control and Optimization, and Systems & Control Letters.

He was chairman of Wiskundig Genootschap. He was a Fellow of the IEEE, the American Mathematical Society, the SIAM and the International Federation of Automatic Control. He was an honorary Doctorate in Liege (2010).

Writings

  • With J. Polderman: Introduction to Mathematical Systems Theory, Springer Verlag 1998
  • Dissipative dynamical systems, Part 4, Séminaires IRIA, analysis et Contrôle de Systèmes, IRIA, Rocquencourt, 1972
  • The behavioral approach to open and inter- connected systems: Modeling by tearing, zooming, and linking, IEEE Control Systems Magazine, Volume 27, 2007, pp. 46-99
  • In Control, almost from the beginning to the day after tomorrow, the European Journal of Control, Volume 13, 2007, 71-81
University of Rhode Island Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics Mathematics Genealogy Project
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