From Professor Robert Vallée, President of the World Organisation of Systems and Cybernetics (WOSC)

Citation

(2012), "From Professor Robert Vallée, President of the World Organisation of Systems and Cybernetics (WOSC)", Kybernetes, Vol. 41 No. 1/2. https://doi.org/10.1108/k.2012.06741aaa.004

From Professor Robert Vallée, President of the World Organisation of Systems and Cybernetics (WOSC)

Article Type: Dedication From: Kybernetes, Volume 41, Issue 1/2

I am pleased to contribute to this special issue of Kybernetes which is dedicated to Professor Yves Cherruault. I recall that his doctoral thesis was prepared under the direction of Professors Jacques Arsac and Jacques-Louis Lions (1963). Professor at Université Pierre et Marie Curie (Paris VI) since 1971, he was Director and founder of Laboratoire MEDIMAT devoted to application of mathematics to medical and biological problems. He directed a great number of theses, and published more than 200 papers and eight books.

He was a friend of WOSC and many of his papers and those of his students were published in Kybernetes. He obtained from the Emerald Literati Network of Emerald Group Publishing, the publisher of Kyberenetes, a Highly Commended Award for Optimisation and Optimal Control for Life Sciences (Kybernetes, Vol. 27, No. 8/9, 1998); the Literati Network Award of Excellence (1999) and, in 2000, The Norbert Wiener Award for Excellence. His book Mathematical Modelling in Biomedicine. Optimal Control of Biomedical Systems (Reidel-Kluver, Dordrecht, 1986) shows what his main centre of interest was which also extended to industrial applications.

A very interesting aspect of the methods used by Yves Cherruault is his treatment of global optimisation (Optimisation globale – Théorie des courbes α-denses, Y. Cherruault, G. Mora, Economica, Paris, 2005, also, “The existence of α-dense curves with minimal length in a metric space”, A. Ziadi, Y. Cherruault, G. Mora, Kybernetes, Vol. 29, No. 2, 2000). The problem is to find the absolute extremum of a real function of several variables. The starting idea, due to Yves Cherruault and Arthur Guillez, Ingénieur des Télécomunications, is to change this problem into a simpler one: to find the absolute extremum of a real function, of one variable only, by the use of a curve filling, up to a certain approximation, of the multivariable domain where the extremum is to be found. The name given to this method was ALIÉNOR, according to the name of a grand-daughter of A. Guillez. This method was refined by the introduction, by Gaspard Mora (Alicante University), of the concept of α-dense curves.

Robert Vallée