Talking at CDC by LG

December 15, 2004 The Bahamas

I am in the hall of the hotel drinking coffee and talking about the blog with some colleagues.
I try to explain again, the purpose of it, asking for stories.

Dimitri Bertsekas told me how he decided to choose our field (decision and control).
He was at MIT and he started in a complete different field , and once while he was in the library he picked a copy of the Ieee Transaction on Automatic Control. He was looking inside when he bumped into Mike Athans pictures. He saw his very smiling and happy face and he decided that a field where people enjoy what they do is what he was looking for.

Munzer Dahleh instead said that it was his brother Mohammed Dahleh that introduced him to control.
After taking his first course in linear algebra as a sophomore and falling in love with the material, Mohammed pointed him to control theory as a possible discipline that he may enjoy particularly due to the extensive linear algebra use.
Munzer loved the abstraction and pedagogy of linear algebra and found that system theory and control poses similar attributes.
This love drove his research interest in his PhD.

Happiness, Enjoyment, Love, and Abstraction have been the basis to become a
Professor at MIT?