Our rst acknowledgment is to Professor C. Desoer, who introduced the idea of the
Q-parametrization (along with the advice, \this is good for CAD") to Stephen Boyd
in EECS 290B at Berkeley in 1981. We thank the reviewers, Professor C. Desoer,
Professor P. Kokotovic, Professor L. Ljung, Dr. M. Workman of IBM, and Dr. R.
Kosut of Integrated Systems, Inc. for valuable suggestions. We are very grateful to
Professor T. Higgins for extensive comments on the history and literature of control
engineering, and a thorough reading of our manuscript. We thank S. Norman,
a coauthor of the paper BBN90], from which this book was developed, and V.
Balakrishnan, N. Boyd, X. Li, C. Oakley, D. Pettibone, A. Ranieri, and Q. Yang
for numerous comments and suggestions.
During the research for and writing of this book, the authors have been sup-
ported by the National Science Foundation (ECS-85-52465), the O ce of Naval
Research (N00014-86-K-0112), and the Air Force O ce of Scienti c Research (89-
0228).
Stephen Boyd
Stanford, California
Craig Barratt
May, 1990
This book was typeset by the authors using LaTEX. The simulations, numerical com-
putations, and gures were developed in matlab and c, under the unix operating
system. We encourage readers to attempt to reproduce our plots and gures, and
would appreciate hearing about any errors.
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