This is a brief review on the recent book: Duality System in Applied Mechanics and Optimal Control, by Zhong Wan-Xie, published by Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2004. The book represents a significant effort to re-establish the historic and deep tie between control and mechanics by striving to connect and integrate concepts, methods, and algorithms in mechanics and control so that a unified framework can be established for both analytical and computational purposes. Clearly, it has demonstrated that the duality system method can be used as a mathematical and systematic foundation to deal with many important concepts and problems in both mechanics and control. This book is not only very useful for research and applications, but also extremely helpful for multidisciplinary curriculum development when students from one field are trying to learning and applying concepts and methods from the other field.
