The proceedings contain a collection of 16 papers presented at the Optimum System Synthesis Conference held at the Aeronautical Systems Division 11 - 13 September 1962. The meeting was directed toward defining the present position of optimum synthesis and determining guides for future research in both applications and theory. Most papers are concerned with various aspects of recent applications and theoretical developments in optimal control such as steepest descent techniques, suboptimal controllers, optimum filtering, and functional analysis techniques. Some earlier results are also discussed.