In 1968, Witsenhausen introduced his celebrated counterexample, which
illustrated that when an information pattern is nonclassical, the
controllers which optimize an expected quadratic cost may be
nonlinear.
For the special invited session commemorating the fortieth anniversary
of the counterexample, we address one of the four follow-up questions
listed in his original paper; namely, whether there is a relation
between the convexity of finding the optimal affine controller, and
whether that controller is in fact optimal. In particular, we discuss
the connections between partially nested structures, for which linear
controllers are known to be optimal, and quadratically
invariant structures, for which optimal linear control is known to be convex.