Arthur Earl Bryson Jr. (born October 7, 1925)[2] is the Paul Pigott Professor of Engineering Emeritus at Stanford University and the "father of modern optimal control theory".
[citation needed] With Henry J. Kelley, he also pioneered an early version of the backpropagation procedure,[3][4][5] now widely used for machine learning and artificial neural networks.
He was a member of the U.S. Navy V-12 program at Iowa State College, and received his B.S.
His thesis An Interferometric Wind Tunnel Study of Transonic Flow past Wedge and Circular Arcs was advised by Hans W. Liepmann.
Bryson was the Ph.D. advisor to the Harvard control theorist Yu-Chi Ho.