In Memory of Jean-François Magni

It is with deep sadness that we must inform our community of the recent death of Jean-François Magni, Research Director at ONERA (Office National d'Etudes et de Recherches Aéronautiques) in Toulouse. Jean-François Magni was born in 1954 in Lamotte Landerron (Gironde), France and died suddenly in January 4th, 2008 a few days short of the new year day. He was educated at Institut Industriel du Nord in Lille from 1974 to 1977 and graduated from the Imperial College, London in 1979. Later in 1981 he obtained his PhD degree from SupAéro. In 1987, he obtained a Doctorate ("Thèse d'Etat") in Automatic Control from the University of Paul Sabatier in Toulouse. He rose the rank of Research Director at ONERA in 2001.

Jean-François Magni's research interests and contributions covered a wide range of topics in Automatic Control. This includes the abstract area of geometric control theory and the more practical pole and eigenstructure assignment techniques in which his pioneering work is widely recognized. He was the first to study necessary and sufficient conditions and their tractability for the challenging problem of pole assignment by static and fixed-order output feedback. Later on, he has extended these techniques to observer design and to fault detection problems. Jean- François Magni's work is memorialized in numerous publications and two reference textbooks in Robust Modal Control and Robust Flight Control. More recently, his research has focused on multi-objective controller design and gain-scheduled control of linear parameter-varying systems using modal techniques. Jean-François Magni was also an active member of the community and organized several European working groups on challenging design problems for aircraft control. His research is certainly marked by rigor so typical of the best French tradition but distinguishes from others by the constant desire to bring new practical tools to the design engineers (RMCT & LFRT toolboxes).

In addition to his scientific accomplishments in control, Jean-François Magni was a talented mycologist who discovered new microscopic species that were documented in the specialized lite- rature. According to all of us, he was a friendly colleague, a passionate supervisor or collaborator, and for some a wonderful wine-tasting companion. He also was a true "routard" in the good sense, eager to travel and to discover other cultures. Jean-François Magni is survived by his wife Nicole, his daughter Camille and his son Romain. To them we offer courage and condolences.

Département Commande des Systèmes et Dynamique du vol,

ONERA, Toulouse, France.