Masanao Aoki

was a Japanese engineer and economist. He was a Professor emeritus of Economics at University of California, Los Angeles.

He earned a BA and MSc in physics from the University of Tokyo, and a PhD in engineering from UCLA in 1960. He was a professor of engineering at UCLA and California–Berkeley from 1960 to 1974, before switching fields to economics in which he remained a professor until his retirement in 2002. Aoki's change of research areas is reflected in the two editions of his influential textbook, Optimization of Stochastic Systems. Originally published in 1967 it contained a rigorous treatment of optimal control methods in engineering, whereas the second edition (published in 1989) was amended by numerous applications in economics. He died on July 24, 2018, aged 87.

Selected publications

A revised edition: