Professor David Q Mayne FREng FRS 1930 - 2024

A tribute to Professor David Mayne, former Head of Department and a pioneer and innovator in systems and control science.

Modesty, excellence and inspirational leadership

It is with great sadness that we announce the death of our long-standing colleague and friend, Professor David Quinn Mayne, on Monday 27th May 2024.

David joined the Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering in 1959 where he remained until his retirement. He was a member and past head of our Control and Power Research Group.

David Mayne was born in 1930 in South Africa and graduated at the University of the Witwatersrand. In 1954, at the age of 24 and recently married, he left South Africa to spend two years working as an electrical engineer at British Thomson Houston Company, Rugby, England. At the end of 1956 he returned to his academic post at the University of Witwatersrand to develop a new course on automatic control. He then decided to apply for an academic position at Imperial College London. Tustin and Westcott, impressed by his MSc thesis, appointed him as lecturer. With his wife Josephine and their three young daughters, Sue, Máire, and Ruth, David arrived in London in the summer of 1959. Following his appointment as Lecturer in 1959, he was promoted to Reader in 1967, and then to Professor in 1971. He also served our Department as Head, from 1984 to 1988, before retiring in 1989. He then moved to UC Davis and returned to Imperial as Emeritus Professor in 1996.

David was a pioneer and innovator who made numerous seminal contributions to systems and control science. His research work has had a lasting impact on the development of control theory, while his leadership has inspired generations of researchers.

Amongst the many high points in David's career, arguably his most important contribution was his development of a rigorous mathematical basis for analysing model predictive control algorithms. Model Predictive Control (MPC) has been used, and it is currently used, in tens of thousands of applications and is a core part of the advanced control technology sold by hundreds of process control vendors. MPC's major strength is its capacity to deal with nonlinearities and hard constraints in a simple and intuitive fashion. Performance certificates require hard theory, and that is what David produced for MPC algorithms. His work underpins a class of algorithms that are provably correct, heuristically explainable, and yield control system designs that meet practically important objectives.

David is also known for developing the first two-filter solution to the smoothing problem. This opened the door to substantial follow-up work and is recognized as a pivotal contribution and the precursor of the so-called particle filtering literature. Another cutting-edge contribution was his work on optimization-based design. He was an early user of exact penalty functions for optimization using sequential quadratic programming. The exact penalty method overcomes the widely referenced 'Maratos effect' identified by one of David’s Ph.D. students. He also contributed to the early development of algorithms for non-differentiable and semi-infinite optimization problems.

David was the first to show that Kalman filtering may be employed for nonstationary parameter estimation. This was a precursor to the now standard update formula employed in recursive parameter estimation and adaptive control. He was also amongst the first to propose Instrumental Variable methods for unbiased parameter estimation. This has since become a key tool in system identification.

In adaptive control he defined a clever way of discounting of old measurements in the identification part of adaptive control algorithms. This gave adaptive control systems the ability to respond to parameter changes.

David was Fellow of the Royal Society, an IFAC Fellow, and a Fellow of IEEE, of IET, and of the Royal Academy of Engineering. He was the recipient, among many other awards, of the IFAC Giorgio Quazza Medal, the IEEE Control Systems Award, and the IFAC High Impact Paper Award.

David’s academic achievements were second only to his modesty and gentle personality; he will be greatly missed by his many colleagues and friends.

He is survived by his beloved wife Josephine; his daughters Sue, Máire, and Ruth; and four grandchildren.

Friends, colleagues and former students are invited to share their own tributes and memories of David in the comments section below.