Variety Quotes - page 19
Part of the charm of synthetic organic chemistry derives from the vastness of the intellectual landscape along several dimensions. First, there is the almost infinite variety and number of possible target structures that lurk in the darkness waiting to be made. Then, there is the vast body of organic reactions that serve to transform one substance into another, now so large in number as to be beyond credibility to a non-chemist. There is the staggering range of reagents, reaction conditions, catalysts, elements, and techniques that must be mobilized in order to tame these reactions for synthetic purposes. Finally, it seems that new information is being added to that landscape at a rate that exceeds the ability of a normal person to keep up with it. In such a troubled setting any author, or group of authors, must be regarded as heroic if through their efforts, the task of the synthetic chemist is eased.
Elias James Corey
At present, a nonspecialist might well regard the Wiener-Kolmogorov theory of filtering and prediction [1, 2] as "classical' - in short, a field where the techniques are well established and only minor improvements and generalizations can be expected.
That this is not really so can be seen convincingly from recent results of Shinbrot [3], Stceg [4], Pugachev [5, 6], and Parzen [7]. Using a variety of methods, these investigators have solved some long-stauding problems in nonstationary filtering and prediction theory. We present here a unified account of our own independent researches during the past two years (which overlap with much of the work [3-71 just mentioned), as well as numerous new results. We, too, use time-domain methods, and obtain major improvements and generalizations of the conventional Wiener theory. In particular, our methods apply without modification to multivariate problems.
Rudolf E. Kálmán