Stanley Dunin

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Stanley Edward Dunin (born April 26, 1936) is a Polish-born American mathematician, aerospace engineer, entrepreneur, and consultant for the World Bank. Though born to the title of Count (Hrabia) in the noble Polish szlachta class (one grandfather was the vice-Finance Minister of Poland, Edward Werner, and the other was noted agriculturalist Rodryg Dunin), he was orphaned by the events of World War II and eventually, with the assistance of United States Senator Homer Ferguson[citation needed] and Count Alfred Niezychowski, emigrated to the United States, where he renounced his title to become an American citizen. He is most notable for having been head of the astrodynamics section of a NASA project, and in the 1960s successfully calculated the way to inject a satellite into a geosynchronous orbit. As such, he was part of the team in 1963 that launched the world's first geosynchronous communications satellite, Syncom 2. In 2003, he was also part of the team that cracked a famous unsolved code, the Cyrillic Projector cipher.

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[edit] Childhood in WWII Poland

He was born in Warsaw as Stanisław Edward Dunin, a member of the Polish noble class (szlachta). His father was Count (Hrabia) Antoni Dunin, son of Rodryg Dunin, and his mother was Zofia Werner, daughter of Polish vice-Finance Minister Edward Werner and great-niece of Saint Raphael Kalinowski. He was named after Antoni's older brother Stanisław, who had been killed in battle in 1920, and then been commemorated in the 1922 painting The Death of Lieutenant Stanisław Dunin (Śmierć Porucznika Stanisława Dunina) by Wojciech Kossak. The family lived near Konin at the Bogusławice estate, a wedding gift from the bride's father.

Dunin had one older sister Krystyna and one younger sister Magdalena, all of whom were orphaned when their parents were killed during the German invasion of Poland in September 1939. The three small children found temporary shelter at Rossocha, the estate of their uncle Jan Czarnowski, papal chamberlain and head of the Polish order of the Knights of Malta, where they stayed from 1939 until Spring 1945, when the family was evicted by the communists, who commandeered the estate for a government research project. Their mother's sister Maria Gabriela Werner, an Auschwitz survivor, then came and took Dunin and his sisters (all of them pre-teens at this point) to Skierniewice, then Pruszkow, and eventually to Paris, where Dunin attended the Catholic school "College Stanislaus."

They lived in Paris for a time while awaiting paperwork to travel to the United States, in which they were assisted by Senator Homer Ferguson of Michigan and Alfred Niezychowski, their half-uncle, who became their guardian in January 1948 when they arrived in Grosse Pointe, Michigan.

[edit] United States citizenship

Dunin attended the Monroe, Michigan military boarding school Hall of the Divine Child, then Campion Jesuit High School in Prairie du Chien, Wisconsin, before moving to Los Angeles, where he became a naturalized US Citizen in July 1955 and received a Bachelor's degree in engineering from UCLA in 1957. He was hired by Litton Industries to work in their Beverly Hills office, but in 1958 returned to UCLA to work towards a Master's degree in mathematics. It was also at UCLA that he met and married Elsie Ivancich, a Croatian-American dance ethnologist (later a full professor at UCLA). They married on June 14, 1958 and had two daughters, Elonka and Teresa (T.J.).

[edit] Aerospace Engineer

Dunin received his Master's degree in Mathematics in 1960, and started working towards a PhD but abandoned it in 1963 when he became involved with a NASA project. He had worked as a lecturer for three years in the UCLA Mathematics department, and then an additional three years in Engineering. Starting in 1959, Dunin began part-time work Hughes Space and Communications Company (a company founded by Howard Hughes), and this eventually expanded to a fulltime position. In 1963, he was involved with the launch of the world's first geosynchronous communications satellite, Syncom 2, working for Donald Williams and Dr. Harold Rosen. Dunin's most significant contribution to the project was calculating the fuel-efficient method to inject the satellite into orbit.

Dunin was the head of the Astrodynamics section of the Aerospace Group in the Space Systems Division at Hughes. With Steve Citron, a senior staff consultant from Purdue, and Hans Meissinger, the manager of the Space Guidance Staff, he presented a paper describing a potential guidance mechanism for a soft-landing unmanned lunar spacecraft. The paper was first presented at the ARS 17th Annual Meeting and Space Flight Exposition in Los Angeles, in November 1962, and published in the AIAA Journal in March 1964.

[edit] Businessman

From 1967 to 1969, Dunin worked at William O'Neil and Company, a stock brokerage firm which in 1963 developed the first computerized database for the stock market. In 1969, Dunin became one of the first few employees at HW Systems (founded in 1968 by Don Henley and Stanton Wong), a company that provided databases for the title insurance industry. In 1974, Dunin founded Title Data Inc. with another company, Informata (Title Data did well enough that Dunin eventually purchased Informata). Dunin returned to school to obtain an MBA from Harvard Business School in 1982, and his company grew to have offices in California and Colorado, until it was sold to TRW in 1985. [1] Dunin worked for TRW for a time as a management consultant, and then started yet another career, joining the Peace Corps, acting as a small business advisor in Burundi and Congo. This work led to an assignment as a World Bank business advisor in Central Asia (including Kazakhstan), where he stayed until the mid-1990s.

Dunin presently lives in the American Southwest, where he owns and manages a small construction company. In 2003, Dunin helped as a member of a team which was organized by his daughter Elonka, to solve and translate a famous code, the Cyrillic Projector cipher.

[edit] Writing

  • Citron, S.J., Dunin, S.E., and Meissinger, H.F. "A Terminal Guidance Technique for Lunar Landing," ARS Preprint 2685-62, Nov. 1962; also AIAA Journal, Vol. 2, No. 3, March 1964, pp. 503-509 [2]
  • Balsam, R.E., and Dunin, S.E., Orbit Determination for Stationary Satellites, 11, 123, Science and Technology Series (American Astronautical Society, 1967) [3]

[edit] References

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