| Rudolf Emil Kálmán | |
|---|---|
| Born | May 19, 1930 Budapest, Kingdom of Hungary |
| Residence | United States |
| Nationality | Hungarian-born American citizen |
| Fields | Electrical Engineering; Mathematics; Applied Engineering Systems Theory |
| Institutions | Stanford University; University of Florida; Swiss Federal Institute of Technology |
| Alma mater |
Massachusetts Institute of Technology; |
| Doctoral advisor | John Ragazzini |
| Notable awards | IEEE Medal of Honor; National Medal of Science; Charles Stark Draper Prize ; Kyoto Prize |
Rudolf (Rudy) Emil Kálmán[1] (in Hungarian Kálmán Rudolf Emil; born May 19, 1930) is a Hungarian-American electrical engineer, mathematical system theorist, and college professor, who was educated in the United States, and has done most of his work there. He is currently a retired professor from three different institutes of technology and universities. He is most noted for his co-invention and development of the Kalman filter, a mathematical formulation that is widely used in control systems, avionics, and outer space manned and unmanned vehicles. For this work, U.S. President Barack Obama awarded Kálmán with the National Medal of Science on October 7, 2009.
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Rudolf Kálmán was born in Budapest. After emigrating to the United States in 1943, he earned his bachelor's degree in 1953 and his master's degree in 1954, both from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, in electrical engineering. Kálmán completed his doctorate in 1957 at Columbia University in New York City.
Kálmán worked as a Research Mathematician at the Research Institute for Advanced Studies in Baltimore, Maryland from 1958 until 1964. He was a professor at Stanford University from 1964 until 1971, and then a Graduate Research Professor and the Director of the Center for Mathematical System Theory, at the University of Florida from 1971 until 1992. Starting in 1973, he also held the chair of Mathematical System Theory at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zürich, Switzerland.
Kálmán is a member of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, the American National Academy of Engineering, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He is a foreign member of the Hungarian, French, and Russian Academies of Science. He has been awarded many honorary doctorates from other universities.
Kálmán received the IEEE Medal of Honor in 1974, the IEEE Centennial Medal in 1984, the Inamori foundation's Kyoto Prize in High Technology in 1985, the Steele Prize of the American Mathematical Society in 1987, the Richard E. Bellman Control Heritage Award in 1997, and the National Academy of Engineering's Charles Stark Draper Prize in 2008.
Kálmán is an electrical engineer by his undergraduate and graduate education at M.I.T. and Columbia University, and he is noted for his co-invention of the Kalman filter (or Kalman-Bucy Filter), which is a mathematical technique widely used in the digital computers of control systems, navigation systems, avionics, and outer-space vehicles to extract a signal from a long sequence of noisy and/or incomplete technical measurements, usually those done by electronic and gyroscopic systems.
Kálmán's ideas on filtering were initially met with vast skepticism, so much so that he was forced to do the first publication of his results in mechanical engineering, rather than in electrical engineering or systems engineering. Kálmán had more success in presenting his ideas, however, while visiting Stanley F. Schmidt at the NASA Ames Research Center in 1960. This led to the use of Kálmán filters during the Apollo program, and furthermore, in the NASA Space Shuttle, in Navy submarines, and in unmanned aerospace vehicles and weapons, such as cruise missiles.
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