Abstract :
My path to Rudolf Kalman (from now on "REK," as he is known to his students) was based on two lucky breaks. Mathematics undergraduates at the University of Buenos Aires are required to write theses on a subject of their choosing. With no clue as to topics, I decided to browse the library bookshelves- a quaint data exploration activity, which a few readers of this publication might once have been familiar with. This is how I found Topics in Mathematical Systems Theory (Kalman, Falb, and Arbib, McGraw Hill, New York, 1969). It was amazing to discover that it was possible to combine the mathematical beauty of algebra with applicable mathematics, and a thesis on automata and linear dynamical systems quickly followed.
