[loser777]

As someone with a rapidly (exponentially?) decaying background in engineering, all the article did was create an insufferable itch of mathematical fuzziness about why these were called zeros until I got to the footnote and the actual article began.

[taneq]

Thanks for the tip, the rest made way more sense after reading that. I don't think I'm particularly poorly read or mathematically versed but I've never heard a pole called a "right-half-plane zero" before, so maybe the author could have lead with that (or even just called it a pole, which I have heard of so at least I'd have been less lost.)

[SilasX]

The article wasn’t doing that, and specifically distinguished poles from zeroes:

>> Control theorists like to classify the behaviour of dynamical systems based on what we call poles and zeros. … Again roughly speaking, zeros describe mathematically how a system reacts to some input in the short term, while poles describe how a system reacts in the long term.

[taneq]

Whoops, adding that to my list of things to read again... >.>