Biography

Rudolf Emil Kálmán is a Hungarian-born American electrical engineer, mathematician, and inventor. He is most noted for his co-invention and development of the Kalman filter, a mathematical algorithm that is widely used in signal processing, control systems, and guidance, navigation and control. U.S. President Barack Obama awarded Kálmán the National Medal of Science on October 7, 2008.

After earning his degrees from MIT and Columbia, Kálmán worked at the Research Institute for Advanced Studies in Baltimore, Stanford, University of Florida, and the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich. His presentation at NASA Ames Research Center in 1960 led to the use of Kálmán filters during the Apollo program, NASA space shuttles, navy submarines, and in unmanned aerospace vehicles and weapons.

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. His awards include IEEE Medal of Honor, the Richard E. Bellman Control Heritage Award in 1997, and the National Academy of Engineering's Charles Stark Draper Prize in 2008.