Buenos Aires
Buenos Aires ( or ; ), officially the Autonomous City of Buenos Aires ( es, link=no, Ciudad Autónoma de Buenos Aires), is the capital and primate city of Argentina. The city is located on the western shore of the Río de la Plata, on South ...
,
Argentina
Argentina (), officially the Argentine Republic ( es, link=no, República Argentina), is a country in the southern half of South America. Argentina covers an area of , making it the second-largest country in South America after Brazil, th ...
) is an Argentine-American
mathematician
A mathematician is someone who uses an extensive knowledge of mathematics in their work, typically to solve mathematical problems.
Mathematicians are concerned with numbers, data, quantity, structure, space, models, and change.
History
On ...
, and distinguished university professor at Northeastern University, who works in the fields
control theory
Control theory is a field of mathematics that deals with the control of dynamical systems in engineered processes and machines. The objective is to develop a model or algorithm governing the application of system inputs to drive the system to a ...
Sontag received his Licenciado degree from the mathematics department at the
University of Buenos Aires
The University of Buenos Aires ( es, Universidad de Buenos Aires, UBA) is a public research university in Buenos Aires, Argentina. Established in 1821, it is the premier institution of higher learning in the country and one of the most prestigi ...
in 1972, and his Ph.D. in Mathematics under Rudolf Kálmán at the Center for Mathematical Systems Theory at the
University of Florida
The University of Florida (Florida or UF) is a public land-grant research university in Gainesville, Florida. It is a senior member of the State University System of Florida, traces its origins to 1853, and has operated continuously on its ...
in 1976.
From 1977 to 2017, he was with the department of mathematics at
Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey
Rutgers University (; RU), officially Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey, is a public land-grant research university consisting of four campuses in New Jersey. Chartered in 1766, Rutgers was originally called Queen's College, and was ...
, where he was a Distinguished Professor of Mathematics as well as a Member of the Graduate Faculty of the Department of Computer Science and the Graduate Faculty of the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, and a Member of the Rutgers Cancer Institute of NJ. In addition, Dr. Sontag served as the head of the undergraduate Biomathematics Interdisciplinary Major, director of the Center for Quantitative Biology, and director of graduate studies of the Institute for Quantitative Biomedicine. In January 2018, Dr. Sontag was appointed as a University Distinguished Professor in th Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering and th Department of BioEngineering at Northeastern University, where he is also an affiliate member of the Department of Mathematics and the Department of Chemical Engineering. Since 2006, he has been a research affiliate at the Laboratory for Information and Decision Systems, MIT, and since 2018 he has been a member of the faculty in th Program in Therapeutic Science, Laboratory for Systems Pharmacology at Harvard Medical School.
Eduardo Sontag has authored over five hundred research papers and monographs and book chapters in the above areas with about 60,000 citations and an h-index of 104. He is in the editorial board of several journals, including: IET Proceedings Systems Biology, Synthetic and Systems Biology International Journal of Biological Sciences, and Journal of Computer and Systems Sciences, and is a former board member of SIAM Review, IEEE Transactions on Automatic Control, Systems and Control Letters, Dynamics and Control, Neurocomputing, Neural Networks, Neural Computing Surveys, Control-Theory and Advanced Technology, Nonlinear Analysis: Hybrid Systems, and Control, Optimization and the Calculus of Variations. In addition, he is a co-founder and co-Managing Editor of '' Mathematics of Control, Signals, and Systems''.
Sontag was married to Frances David-Sontag, who died in 2017. His daughter Laura Kleiman is founder and CEO at Reboot Rx, and his son David Sontag leads the MIT Clinical Machine Learning Group.
Work
His work in
control theory
Control theory is a field of mathematics that deals with the control of dynamical systems in engineered processes and machines. The objective is to develop a model or algorithm governing the application of system inputs to drive the system to a ...
led to the introduction of the concept of
input-to-state stability Input-to-state stability (ISS)Eduardo D. Sontag. Mathematical Control Theory: Finite-Dimensional Systems. Springer-Verlag, London, 1998Hassan K. Khalil. Nonlinear Systems. Prentice Hall, 2002.stability theory notion for
nonlinear systems
In mathematics and science, a nonlinear system is a system in which the change of the output is not proportional to the change of the input. Nonlinear problems are of interest to engineers, biologists, physicists, mathematicians, and many other ...
, and
control-Lyapunov function In control theory, a control-Lyapunov function (CLF) is an extension of the idea of Lyapunov function V(x) to systems with control inputs. The ordinary Lyapunov function is used to test whether a dynamical system is ''(Lyapunov) stable'' or (more ...
s. Many of the subsequent results were proved in collaboration with his student Yuan Wang and with David Angeli. In systems biology, Sontag introduced together with David Angeli the concept of input/output monotone system. In theory of computation, he proved the first results on computational complexity in nonlinear controllability, and introduced together with his student
Hava Siegelmann
Hava Siegelmann is a professor of computer science. Her academic position is in the school of Computer Science and the Program of Neuroscience and Behavior at the University of Massachusetts Amherst; she is the director of the school's Biologica ...
a new approach to analog computation and super-Turing computing.
Hendrik W. Bode Lecture Prize The Hendrik W. Bode Lecture Prize is an award given by the IEEE Control Systems Society (CSS) to recognize distinguished contributions to control systems science or engineering. It was established in 1989, named after Hendrik W. Bode (1905–1982), ...
from the IEEE,
the 2002 Board of Trustees Award for Excellence in Research from Rutgers University,
the 2005 Teacher/Scholar Award from Rutgers University,
and the 2011
IEEE Control Systems Award
The IEEE Control Systems Award is a technical field award given to an individual by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) "for outstanding contributions to control systems engineering, science or technology". It is an IEEE- ...
.
In 2022, he was awarded the
Richard E. Bellman Control Heritage Award The Richard E. Bellman Control Heritage Award is an annual award (since 1979) given by the American Automatic Control Council (AACC) for achievements in control theory, named after the applied mathematician Richard E. Bellman. The award is given fo ...
, which is the highest recognition in control theory and engineering in the United States. He was honored “for pioneering contributions to stability analysis and nonlinear control, and for advancing the control theoretic foundations of systems biology.”
In 2011 he became a fellow of the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics, in 2012 a fellow of the
American Mathematical Society
The American Mathematical Society (AMS) is an association of professional mathematicians dedicated to the interests of mathematical research and scholarship, and serves the national and international community through its publications, meetings, ...
, and in 2014 a fellow of the
International Federation of Automatic Control
The International Federation of Automatic Control (IFAC), founded in September 1957, is a multinational federation of 49 national member organizations (NMO), each one representing the engineering and scientific societies concerned with automatic c ...
Research.com top 100 US electrical engineers.
Research.com top 100 US mathematicians.
Most-cited author in: IEEE Transactions on Automatic Control in 1981, 1996, 1997; Systems and Control Letters 1989, 1991, 1995, 1998, and lifetime of journal; SIAM Journal on Control and Optimization 1983, 1986; Theoretical Computer Science 1994; as well as many other journal/years.
Elsevier/Stanford list of top 0.5% among 2% top scientists worldwide.
MathScinet list of three most-cited applied mathematicians who got PhD in 1976.https://mathcitations.github.io/ MathScinet list of three most-cited applied mathematicians who got PhD in 1976.