Karl Johan Åström 1934 – 2026

Biography

Karl Johan Åström was a Swedish control theorist regarded as one of the world’s most influential researchers in automatic control. Born on August 5, 1934, in Östersund, he worked for IBM in California before taking the chair of the newly founded Department of Automatic Control at the Lund Institute of Technology in 1965, where he remained professor emeritus. His work shaped adaptive control, stochastic control, system identification and computer control, and his 1965 framework for Markov decision processes with incomplete information led to the notion of the partially observable Markov decision process. He received the IEEE Medal of Honor in 1993 and published five books, including Adaptive Control. He died in Lund on November 12, 2026, aged 92.