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by nihzm 1028 days ago
I think historically control theory might have been left out of compsci curricula because of is prerequisites that are not very relevant most other areas of the degree (complex analysis, spectral theory, continous time dynamical systems). Especially the "old" theory from the mid 20th century can get very difficult to study on your own because everything was described in term of continous time stochastic processes (which are very hard!). Interestingly as computers became powerful, throughout the 90s there was a shift towards discrete time or hybrid dynamics, and one could make a case that the former is teachable without too many prerequisited in compsci degrees. Distributed computation would especially benefits from having students that know a bit of control theory, or even networking where for instance control theory explains why a certain set of BGP policies / congestion control algorithms converge to a stable equilibrium and other do not.