Background
Zames, George David was born on January 7, 1934 in Poland. Son of Sam Simha and Leona Zames.
Zames, George David was born on January 7, 1934 in Poland. Son of Sam Simha and Leona Zames.
Zames entered at the age of 15 and received a Bachelor of Engineering degree in Engineering Physics. Graduating at the top of his class, Zames won an Athlone Fellowship to study in England, and moved to the Imperial College. Graduating in two years, his advisors included Colin Cherry, Dennis Gabor, and John Hugh Westcott.
In 1956, Zames entered the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to start his doctoral studies, and in 1960 earned a Doctor of Science. for a thesis titled Nonlinear Operations of System Analysis.
He was advised by Norbert Wiener and Yuk-Wing Lee.
Zames is known for his fundamental contributions to the theory of robust control, and was credited for the development of various well-known results such as small-gain theorem, passivity theorem, circle criterion in input–output form, and most famously, H-infinity methods. Childhood Growing up in Warsaw, Zames and his family escaped the city at the onset of World World War II, and moved to Kobe (Japan), through Lithuania and Siberia, and finally to the Anglo-French International Settlement in Shanghai. Zames indicated later that he and his family owe their lives to the transit visa provided by the Japanese Consul to Lithuania, Senpo Sugihara.
In Shanghai, Zames continued his schooling, and in 1948, the family emigrated to Canada.
Education From 1960 to 1965, Zames held various teaching positions at Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Harvard University. In 1965, Zames received a Guggenheim Fellowship and moved to the National Aeronautics and Space Administration Electronic Center (European Research Council), where he founded the Office of Control Theory and Applications (OCTA).
In 1969, it was announced that National Aeronautics and Space Administration European Research Council was to be closed, and Zames joined the newly established Department of Transportation Center in 1970. In 1972, Zames spent a sabbatical at the Technion in Haifa, Israel, and in 1974, he returned to McGill University to become a professor and eventually the MacDonald Chair of Electrical Engineering until his death in 1997.
Family Zames was married to Eva, whom he met in Israel.
They have two sons, Ethan and Jonathan. Zames’s research focused on imprecisely modelled systems using the input-output method, an approach that is distinct from the state space representation that dominated control theory for several decades. At the core of much of his work is the objective of complexity reduction through organization: Foreign the purposes of control design, gross qualitative properties such as robustness can be analyzed and predicted without depending on accurate models or syntheses.
Mathematical analysis provides topological tools that are very well suited for this purpose, such as compactness, contraction, and fixed-point methods.
Furthermore, in control design, where there is lots of model uncertainty, it is often more important to be able to gauge qualitative behaviour (robustness, stability, existence of oscillations) than to compute exactly. The International Journal of Robust and Nonlinear Control published in 2000 a special issue in George Zames’s honour, including a complete list of his publications.
Reviews of Zames’s life and legacy were published by South. Mitter and A. Tennenbaum, J. C. Willems, and in a volume resulting from a conference held to honor the occasion of Zames"s 60th birthday.
Fellow Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (Control Science Field award 1985), Royal Society of Canada.
Married Eva Eisenfarb, July 21, 1964. Children: Ethan, Jonathan.