Lennart Ljung - Biography#

Lennart Ljung received his PhD in Automatic Control from Lund Institute of Technology in 1974. Since 1976 he is Professor of the chair of Automatic Control In Linköping, Sweden. He has held visiting positions at Stanford and MIT.

Ljung has written 10 books, about 200 articles in refereed international journals and about 350 articles in international conferences. For more than 30 years, he has clearly been the pioneer and leader in the field of system identification and parameter estimation. His contributions have been both highly theoretical and of enormous practical impact. The publication of his book "System identification: theory for the user" in 1987 (2nd in 1989) was an absolute milestone that completely revolutionized the field. At the same time, Ljung produced his Matlab System Identification toolbox that made it easy for researchers and engineers to implement his methods and algorithms. His book is universally considered as the main source for the theory of system identification. As for his toolbox, which he keeps updating constantly, there is simply no competitor: its circulation runs in the hundreds of thousands.

Ljung is an IEEE Fellow, an IFAC Fellow and an IFAC Advisor. He is as a member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences (KVA), a member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Engineering Sciences (IVA), an Honorary Member of the Hungarian Academy of Engineering, an Honorary Professor of the Chinese Academy of Mathematics and Systems Science, and a Foreign Member of the US National Academy of Engineering (NAE). He has been a member of the Board of the Swedish Research Council from 2001 to 2006.

Ljung has received honorary doctorates from the Baltic State Technical University in St Petersburg, from Uppsala University, Sweden, from the Technical University of Troyes, France, from the Catholic University of Leuven, Belgium and from Helsinki University of Technology, Finland. In 2002 he received the Quazza Medal from IFAC, in 2003 he received the Hendrik W. Bode Lecture Prize from the IEEE Control Systems Society, and he was the 2007 recipient of the IEEE Control Systems Award.