Book excerpt: Flow control and optimization has been an important part of experimental flow science throughout the last century. As research in computational fluid dynamics (CFD) matured, CFD codes were routinely used for the simulation of fluid flows. Subsequently, mathematicians and engineers began examining the use of CFD algorithms and codes for optimization and control problems for fluid flows. Perspectives in Flow Control and Optimization presents flow control and optimization as a subdiscipline of computational mathematics and computational engineering. It introduces the development and analysis of several approaches for solving flow control and optimization problems through the use of modern CFD and optimization methods. The author discusses many of the issues that arise in the practical implementation of algorithms for flow control and optimization, and provides the reader with a clear idea of what types of flow control and optimization problems can be solved, how to develop effective algorithms for solving such problems, and potential problems in implementing the algorithms. Audience: this book is written for both those new to the field of control and optimization as well as experienced practitioners, including engineers, applied mathematicians, and scientists interested in computational methods for flow control and optimization. Readers with a solid background in calculus and only slight familiarity with partial differential equations should find the book easy to understand. Knowledge of fluid mechanics, computational fluid dynamics, calculus of variations, control theory or optimization is beneficial, but is not essential, to comprehend the bulk of the presentation. Only Chapter 6 requires a substantially higher level of mathematical knowledge, most notably in the areas of functional analysis, numerical analysis, and partial differential equations.