|
|
 Rudolph E. Kalman, a graduate research professor emeritus at the University of Florida and ad personam chair at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich, and Andrew J. Majda, a professor of mathematics and of applied and computational mathematics at Princeton University, were among the 60 new members and 15 foreign associates elected to the National Academy of Sciences in April.
The election of Kalman, a control theorist who is "without a doubt the most influential researcher in the field," provides "additional evidence, if more was needed, that the field of systems and control is now an established part of mathematics and science," says Eduardo Sontag of Rutgers University. Kalman is best known for the linear filtering technique that he and Richard Bucy developed in 1960-1961 to strip unwanted noise out of a stream of data. The Kalman filter is widely used in navigational and guidance systems, radar tracking, sonar ranging, and satellite orbit determination (for the Ranger, Apollo, and Mariner missions, for instance), as well as in fields as diverse as seismic data processing, nuclear power plant instrumentation, and econometrics. (See "Engineers Look to Kalman Filtering for Guidance" in the August 1993 issue of SIAM News, page 8, for a discussion of the origin, function, and extraordinary usefulness of the Kalman filter.)
The Kalman filter, which is based on the use of state-space techniques and recursive algorithms, revolutionized the field of estimation. The filter was the first major contribution in Kalman's influential work in control theory, Sontag observes. Sontag and Yutaka Yamamoto of Kyoto University, both former students of Kalman's, provided SIAM News with the following summary of Kalman's work:
"During the 1960s, Kalman was the leader in the development of a rigorous theory of control systems. Among his many outstanding contributions were the formulation and study of most fundamental state-space notions (including controllability, observability, minimality, realizability from input/output data, matrix Riccati equations, linear-quadratic control, and the separation principle) that are today ubiquitous in control. While some of these concepts were also encountered in other contexts, such as optimal control theory, it was Kalman who recognized the central role that they play in systems analysis. The paradigms formulated by Kalman and the basic results he established have become an intrinsic part of the foundations of control and systems theory and are standard tools in research as well as in every exposition of the area, from undergraduate engineering textbooks to graduate-level mathematics research monographs. During the 1970s Kalman played a major role in the introduction of algebraic and geometric techniques in the study of linear and nonlinear control systems. His work since the 1980s has focused on a system-theoretic approach to the foundations of statistics, econometric modeling, and identification, as a natural complement to his earlier studies of minimality and realizability."
Born in Hungary, Kalman received BS and MS degrees from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a DSci in engineering from Columbia University (1957). In the early years of his career he held research positions at IBM and at the Research Institute for Advanced Studies in Baltimore. From 1962 to 1971, he was at Stanford University. In 1971, he became a graduate research professor and director of the Center for Mathematical System Theory at the University of Florida, recently retiring with emeritus status. Kalman's contributions to control theory and to applied mathematics and engineering in general have been widely recognized. In 1985, he was one of four recipients of the Kyoto Prize, inaugurated in that year by the Inamori Foundation of Japan. The Kyoto prize, which in 1985 carried a cash award of 45 million yen (then about $200,000), is sometimes referred to as the "Japanese Nobel prize." It recognizes "outstanding intellectual or creative activities which have significantly enriched the human experience." Kalman received the prize in the field of advanced technology. Among the other honors Kalman has received are the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers' highest award, the Medal of Honor (1974), and the American Mathematical Society's Steele Prize (1986), which recognized the fundamental importance of the papers on linear filtering Kalman published in 1960 and 1961. Kalman is a member of the French, Hungarian, and Russian Academies of Sciences and of the National Academy of Engineering, and is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
November 30, 1999
Posted by Greg Welch at UNC.
|
|
University of Florida 