Walter Richard Evans (January 15, 1920 – July 10, 1999) was a noted American control theorist and the inventor of the root locus method and the Spirule device in 1948.

He was the recipient of the 1987 American Society of Mechanical Engineers Rufus Oldenburger Medal[1] and the 1988 AACC's Richard E. Bellman Control Heritage Award.

in Electrical Engineering from the University of California, Los Angeles in 1951.

He published a book named "Control System Dynamics" with McGraw-Hill in 1954.

One of his children, Gregory Walter Evans, wrote an article about his father in the December 2004 issue of the IEEE Control Magazine.