Rudolf E. Kálmán Distinguished Lecturer Program
The Institute for Computer Science and Control (MTA SZTAKI) Budapest, Hungary launches a lecture series to commemorate the intellectual heritage of late Prof. Rudolf E. Kálmán, who died in 2016 at the age of 86.
The aim of this lecture series, which will be calledRudolf E. Kálmán Distinguished Lecturer Program, is to present some recent significant scientific results ‒ accomplished via the fruitful interaction of pure and applied sciences and scientific fields, such as mathematics, engineering, informatics and control theory ‒ in a generic and plain scientific manner to a fairly wide professional audience. The lectures will be given by widely known leading scientists of international standing who will strive to interpret multidisciplinary results and convey theirrelevance to an audience with varied scientific background.
The first Distinguished Lecturer of the series will be Prof. László Székelyhidi, Professor of Applied Mathematics at the University of Leipzig, Germany. He is the winner of the Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Prize of the German Research Foundation for the year 2018. He is a highly esteemed researcher of the theory of partial differential equations. His lecture is scheduled for the Fall semester of the academic year of 2018/2019.
Biography of Rudolf E. Kálmán
Rudolf E. Kálmán (May 19, 1930 – July 2, 2016) was a Hungarian-born electrical engineer, mathematician, and inventor, who emigrated from Hungary during the World War II as a teenager and fled to and settled in the United States in 1943. He graduated from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, MA, US in 1954 with an MSc in electrical engineering. He completed his doctorate at Columbia University in the City of New York, NY, US, in 1957.
He worked as a research mathematician at the Research Institute for Advanced Studies in Baltimore, MD, US from 1958 until 1964. Then he held a professorship at Stanford University from 1964 until 1971. Between 1971 and 1992 he worked as the Director of the Center for Mathematical System Theory at the University of Florida, Gainesville, FL, US. As from 1973 ‒ in parallel with his other research and academic commitments ‒ he was the Chair of Mathematical System Theory at the ETH Zürich, Switzerland.
A major segment of his scientific activity was devoted to laying the mathematical foundations of the theory of linear systems, which was largely inspired by the theory of electric circuits. This theory was later extended to a range of applications in avionics, telecommunication and automatic control. Whiledeveloping a mathematical methodology for the design of navigation systems, he discovered a computationally viable algorithm for filtering signals in complexphysical signals, known asthe celebrated Kalman filter.
He received a number of prestigious awards, prizes and academic memberships. Among others he was a member of the US National Academy of Sciences, as well as the member of the American National Academy of Engineering, and he was an honorary member of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. In 1985, he was the first to receive the Kyoto Prize for Advanced Technology. He received the Charles Stark Draper Prize awarded by the Ameraican National Academy of Engineering in 2008, considered as a Nobel prize in engineering. In 2009, he was awarded with the National Medal of Science (US) by President Barack Obama.
Along his prestigious international academic recognitions, Professor Kálmán was proud of his Hungarian scientific recognition, his honorary membership of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, and his professional connections with theInstitute for Computer Science and Control (MTA SZTAKI), where he gave several talks, and also, had his own office till his death.
