Renowned Hungarian scientist, inventor of the "Kálmán Filter", Rudolf Kálmán dies aged 86
Source: Hungary Today
World-famous engineer and mathematican Rudolf Kálmán passed away, news agency MTI reported. The legendary Hungarian-born inventor of the so-called Kálmán filter, a mathematical technique widely used in the digital computers of control systems, navigation systems, avionics, and outer-space vehicles, died last Saturday at the age of 86, the Hungarian Academy of Sciences told MTI.
Rudolf Kálmán was born in Budapest in 1930 but emigrated to the United States in 1943 where he studied electrical engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He received his doctoral degree at the Columbia University in New York City in 1957. His most famous scientific invention, the Kálmán filter, was used during the Apollo program as well as in the NASA Space Shuttle, in US Navy submarines, and in aerospace weapons, such as cruise missiles.
During his outstanding scientific career Rudolf Kálmán worked as a leading researcher in Baltimore and Zürich and also as a professor at Stanford University (1964-1971) and at the University of Florida (1971-1992). He was a member of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, the American National Academy of Engineering. He was a foreign member of the Hungarian, French, and Russian Academies of Sciences and he was awarded several honorary doctorates and prizes across the world.
Read more: http://hungarytoday.hu/news/renowned-hungarian-scientis-rudolf-kalman-dies-aged-86-46732
Anybody else who studied EE or CS will no doubt have encountered his brilliant filter. Though if you had asked me, I would have assumed he had been dead for decades.
Also, a great example of why we should accept war refugees.
Lucky Luciano
(11,257 posts)Recursion
(56,582 posts)One of those ideas that seems obvious in retrospect, but took brilliance to come up with.
burrowowl
(17,641 posts)hunter
(38,317 posts)The Kálmán Filter is useful in modeling the central nervous system's control of movement.
Sophisticated robots are controlled in a similar manner.
FrodosPet
(5,169 posts)It's an extremely important tool in 3-D SLAM (Simultaneous Localization and Mapping), which is critical to self driving cars.
http://biorobotics.ri.cmu.edu/papers/sbp_papers/integrated3/kleeman_kalman_basics.pdf
Sad to hear of his passing, I want to read more of his history and his work.
uawchild
(2,208 posts)What are the odds that a person would discover a filter that has the same name as they?
Woah, man. Cosmic. The universe does some strange shit sometimes...
nsd
(2,406 posts)Born in Hungary, but moved to the US at age 13.