Recollections of Norbert Wiener and the first IFAC World Congress

I was an undergraduate student in electrical engineering at MIT, graduating with a bachelor’s degree in 1951, and then stayed on at MIT and got a master’s degree in electrical engineering in 1953. I continued further in electrical engineering and got a doctorate—it’s called an Sc.D. at MIT. I finished the doctorate in 1956 and, upon completing that, became an assistant professor in electrical engineering and taught at MIT for three years. Then in 1959 I joined the faculty in electrical engineering at Stanford, where I have been up until this day, still teaching, researching, and writing. I tell you all this about my own history so that when I tell you stories, you will know about my time frame and it will help in piecing the stories together.