In 2014, President Barack Obama awarded Kailath the National Medal of Science for "transformative contributions to the fields of information and system science, for distinctive and sustained mentoring of young scholars, and for translation of scientific ideas into practical engineering technologies." His textbook Linear Systems is a direct reflection of this pedagogical brilliance and deep theoretical insight. The Core Architecture of Linear Systems

Anyone taking courses in modern control or linear systems theory.

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: Originally published by Prentice-Hall, the book is often available through university libraries.

A cornerstone of modern control theory is determining whether a system can be steered to a desired state (controllability) and whether its internal states can be deduced from its outputs (observability). Kailath’s text provides elegant proofs and geometric interpretations of the controllability and observability matrices: