The "Nobel Prize in engineering" awarded for the design of a feedback control system [From the Editor

Abstract

The Queen Elizabeth (QE) Prize for Engineering was created by the United Kingdom as a global prize for recognizing and celebrating outstanding advances in engineering that have changed the world. The media commonly refers to this prize as the Prize in Engineering, since the prize is open to anyone in the world and is intended to be an engineering counterpart to the well-known Nobel Prize for chemistry, physics, and physiology/medicine. In 2013 the first recipients of the QE Prize for Engineering were five people primarily credited with the development of the Internet and the World Wide Web: Louis Pouzin, Robert Elliot Kahn, Vinton Vint G. Cerf, Tim Berners-Lee, and Marc Andreesen. More specifically, the first three recipients were recognized for their seminal contributions to the protocols (or standards) that together make up the fundamental architecture of the Internet, and the latter two recipients were recognized for creating the World Wide Web and the Web browser, respectively. This main focus of this column is the contributions of Bob Kahn, who designed the rules that govern the way information is passed between computers, that is, the main control engineering task.