Israel Gohberg and Engineering

Abstract

It is a great honor for me to share some of my experiences with my friend, mentor and colleague Israel Gohberg on the occasion of his 80-th birthday. My background is in engineering and I am not a professional mathematician by training. When I was a graduate student, it became clear to me that operator theory played a fundamental role in control theory and signal processing. For example, the projection theorem is the basic tool used derive the Kalman and Levinson filter. In fact, the first time I was introduced to some of Gohberg-Krein’s work was as graduate student in engineering. In our engineering department they were viewed as giants. One of the things that I find most intriguing about Professor Gohberg’s mathematical work is how his research has played such an important role in engineering, especially in control theory and signal processing. The Gohberg-Semencul formula for inverting Toeplitz matrices is now standard material in many courses on signal processing and can be found in various engineering text books. Professor Gohberg is a true genius at solving important mathematical problems that have immediate ramifications in engineering and applied sciences.