[throwaway9870]

A couple days ago there was a thread on Hacker News that devolved into a discussion of what a comp-sci student learns in school that they can't learn by themselves. Control systems are a good example of something that is good to have a basic background in and can be hard to learn by yourself. I think it much easier to learn this topic in school because you have an instructor to answer questions and are surrounded by other students who you can discuss the topic with to help you gain intuition about all the math.

[nihzm]

I think historically control theory might have been left out of compsci curricula because of is prerequisites that are not very relevant most other areas of the degree (complex analysis, spectral theory, continous time dynamical systems). Especially the "old" theory from the mid 20th century can get very difficult to study on your own because everything was described in term of continous time stochastic processes (which are very hard!). Interestingly as computers became powerful, throughout the 90s there was a shift towards discrete time or hybrid dynamics, and one could make a case that the former is teachable without too many prerequisited in compsci degrees. Distributed computation would especially benefits from having students that know a bit of control theory, or even networking where for instance control theory explains why a certain set of BGP policies / congestion control algorithms converge to a stable equilibrium and other do not.