Short answers, pulled from the story.
Arthur Earl Bryson Jr., born on the 7th of October 1925, is the Paul Pigott Professor of Engineering Emeritus at Stanford University and is called the father of modern optimal control theory. With Henry J. Kelley he also pioneered an early version of the backpropagation procedure used in machine learning and artificial neural networks.
Arthur E. Bryson, working with Henry J. Kelley, pioneered an early version of the backpropagation procedure. That procedure is now widely used for machine learning and artificial neural networks.
Arthur E. Bryson was a member of the U.S. Navy V-12 program at Iowa State College, where he received his B.S. in aeronautical engineering in 1946. He earned his Ph.D. from the California Institute of Technology in 1951, with a thesis advised by Hans W. Liepmann.
Arthur E. Bryson was the Ph.D. advisor to the Harvard control theorist Yu-Chi Ho.
Arthur E. Bryson was elected to the National Academy of Engineering in 1970 and the National Academy of Sciences in 1973. He received the John R. Ragazzini Award in 1982, the IEEE Control Systems Science and Engineering Award in 1984, the Richard E. Bellman Control Heritage Award in 1990, and the Daniel Guggenheim Medal in 2009.
Arthur E. Bryson's Ph.D. thesis was titled An Interferometric Wind Tunnel Study of Transonic Flow past Wedge and Circular Arcs. It was advised by Hans W. Liepmann at the California Institute of Technology, where Bryson graduated in 1951.