For Lotfi Zadeh on his 90th birthday

I met lotfi zadeh in 1965 when he arranged for me to attend a conference devoted to mathematical programming and optimal control in colorado springs, colorado. lotfi was undoubtedly one of the major inspirations behind the organization of this conference. the fact that optimal control problems in discrete-time could be viewed as mathematical programming problems, and the maximum principle could be obtained using the duality theory of nonlinear programming, perhaps not in full generality, was recognized at that time.