Michael Athans (born Michael Athanassiades in Drama, Greece, May 3, 1937 - May 26, 2020) was a Greek-American control theorist and a Professor Emeritus in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He was a Fellow of the IEEE (1973) and a Fellow of the AAAS (1977). He was the recipient of numerous awards for his contributions in the field of control theory, and had a remarkable career in academia. A pioneer in the field of control theory, he helped shape modern control theory and spearheaded, together with students and colleagues, the field of control system design and the field of robust control. These fundamental contributions were made in the course of Athans’s long and deeply accomplished tenure at MIT, as a member of th