I was looking for classic textbooks on control theory, and I happened to turn up a surprising mention of Bill Powers’ name. It’s in a discussion from 2007 in the IEEE Control Systems Magazine on “What Is Your Favorite Book on Classical Control?” (IEEE Xplore Full-Text PDF:).
I feel slightly dated seeing that my favorite text falls in the “more than 35 years ago category”! In any event, I learned classical control in the fall of 1977 from Dorf’s book in a graduate-level course at the University of Michigan in the Computer, Information, and Control Engineering Program. The course was taught by Bill Powers before he left to head up research at Ford. I was fascinated by the beauty and simplicity of the block diagrams as well as their ability to capture the dynamics of systems ranging from spacecraft to human speech. Bill had a gentle way of teaching math to engineers: He always used the word “property” instead of “theorem,” and he presented ideas with great clarity. I remember the long elastic band with a weight on the end that he brought to class to demonstrate amplification and phase shift. That simple demonstration made the concept easy to grasp, and I still think of the demo every time I teach the topic. Getting back to Dorf’s book, every so often I flip through it, realizing how difficult it is to teach this subtle subject. Nowadays, I teach classical control within the context of flight mechanics. The ideal book that merges these topics is waiting to be written. Dennis Bernstein, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor"
Is this the Bill Powers, or was there someone else of the same name involved in control theory back then?