History of the Discovery of the Pontryagin Maximum Principle

Abstract

We briefly describe the history of the discovery of the Pontryagin maximum principle in optimal control theory in the mid-1950s by Academician L. S. Pontryagin in collaboration with his students—V. G. Boltyanskii and the author of the present paper—who were then young scientists at the Department of Differential Equations headed by Pontryagin at the Steklov Mathematical Institute.