David Mayne Explained

David Quinn Mayne
Birth Date:23 April 1930
Birth Place:Germiston, Gauteng South Africa
Death Place:Oxford
Field:Control theory
Electrical engineering
Mathematical optimization
Work Institution:Imperial College London, Harvard University, University of California, Davis
Alma Mater:Witwatersrand University, Imperial College London
Doctoral Advisor:John Westcott
Doctoral Students:Peter E. Caines

David Quinn Mayne, FRS, FIEEE, FREng[1] (23 April 1930 - 27 May 2024) was a South African-born British academic, engineer, teacher and author. His pioneering and lasting contribution is in the field of control systems engineering.[2] His research interests centred on optimization and optimization-based design, nonlinear control, control of constrained systems, model predictive control and adaptive control.

Career

Having obtained his BSc.(Eng) at the University of the Witwatersrand David Mayne began his career in 1950 as a lecturer there (1950–54; 1957–59). In 1954 he took up a two year post working as an electrical engineer at the British Thomson-Houston Company, Rugby, England. At the end of 1956 he returned to his academic post at the University of Witwatersrand to develop a new course in automatic control and gaining a MSc.(Eng). He next applied for a research position at Imperial College London. Impressed by his MSc thesis, Arnold Tustin and John Westcott, appointed him as lecturer.[2]

He lectured at Imperial College London from 1959-67 and in 1967 obtained his DSc (Eng) and PhD at the University of London under John Westcott.[3] He was a Research Fellow at Harvard (1971). At Imperial College he was Professor of Control theory (1971–91) as well as concurrently heading the Department of Electrical Engineering (1984–88).

He was subsequently a professor in the Dept. of Electrical and Computer Engineering at University of California, Davis from 1989-96.[4] In 1996 he became Professor Emeritus and Senior Research Investigator in the Control and Power Research Group of the Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering at Imperial College London. He was named honorary professor at Beihang University in Beijing in 2006.His students included Peter Caines.

Contribution to science

Mayne's research work is regarded as not only having had a lasting impact on the development of control theory, but his leadership style has inspired generations of new researchers.[2]

Among his many breakthroughs, arguably his most important contribution was his development of a rigorous mathematical method for analysing Model predictive control algorithms (MPC). It is currently used in tens of thousands of applications and is a core part of the advanced control technology by hundreds of process control producers. MPC's major strength is its capacity to deal with nonlinearities and hard constraints in a simple and intuitive fashion. His work underpins a class of algorithms that are provably correct, heuristically explainable, and yield control system designs which meet practically important objectives.[2]

Parisini and Astolfi consider that, "Mayne is also responsible for developing the first two-filter solution to the smoothing problem. This opened the door to substantial developments and is recognised as a pivotal contribution and precursor of the so-called particle filtering. Another cutting-edge contribution was his work on optimization-based design. He was an early user of exact penalty functions for optimization using sequential quadratic programming. The exact penalty method overcomes the widely referenced Maratos effect, identified by one of Mayne’s Ph.D. students. He also contributed to the early development of algorithms for non-differentiable and semi-infinite optimization problems".[2]

Personal life

David Quinn Mayne was born in Germiston, South Africa. He completed his education up to Master's level at the University of the Witwatersrand.[4] Early in his career he married fellow South African, Josephine. They had three daughters. The family moved to the UK in the 1950s where Mayne continued his research.He died in Oxford aged 94.

Awards and affiliations

Selected publications

Papers

Papers on optimization and optimal control

External links

Notes and References

  1. Web site: List of Fellows. Royal Academy of Engineering. 21 April 2018. 21 May 2020. https://web.archive.org/web/20200521041125/https://www.raeng.org.uk/about-us/the-fellowship/list-of-fellows. dead.
  2. Web site: Parisini, Thomas. Astolfi, Alessandro. Professor David Q Mayne FREng FRS 1930 - 2024. 10 June 2024. Imperial College London news. 14 June 2024.
  3. Web site: David Mayne . The Mathematics Genealogy Project . 9 September 2022.
  4. Web site: Knoesen, André. In Memory of Professor Emeritus David Q. Mayne. 6 June 2024. University of California, Davis. 14 June 2024.
  5. Web site: IEEE Control Systems Award . . 30 March 2011 . dead . https://web.archive.org/web/20101229173014/http://www.ieeecss.org/main/awards/control-systems-field-award . 29 December 2010 .