"He had one big idea and ... that was the idea of relating many kinds of mathematical and scientific problems to the study of vector fields on manifolds and the properties of the related flows. That was his central theme and central mechanism."
Browder on Smale [p. 494, HMS93]
In the last issue of the IEEE Control Systems Magazine, Prof. Sepulchre wrote an exhilarating short piece on the art of the state, or as he (also) puts it ``the definite victory of computation over modeling in science and engineering''. As someone with virtually no track record, I am happy to also shed my light on the matter.