The papers of Hungarian-American electrical engineer, mathematician, co-inventor of the Kalman filter, and former Stanford engineering professor Rudolf E. Kálmán (1930-2016) are now available for research.
Spanning 1954-2016, the Kálmán papers (SC1680) comprise biographical materials, information regarding awarded prizes, technical grants and publications, lectures, course materials, and correspondence which represent his career and highlight his contributions to the field of modern control theory in systems applications. For more information regarding the arrangement of the collection and to review the descriptions of the collection contents, please see the collection finding aid.
About Rudolf E. Kálmán
The son of an electrical engineer, Rudolf E. Kálmán was born in Budapest, Hungary on May 19,1930. In 1944, four years after Hungary signed the Tripartite Act to become the fourth member of the Axis powers during World War II, Kálmán and his family decided to emigrate to the U.S. They left Budapest in 1944 and arrived finally in the United States after five years, after a difficult time as refugees in war-torn Europe.
In America, Kálmán’s interest and talent in mathematics led him to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he received his bachelor's and master's degrees in electrical engineering in 1953 and 1954. Kálmán continued his doctoral studies at Columbia University and received his PhD degree in 1957 under the guidance of John R. Raggazzini, known for his work on ultra high frequency transmitters and receivers, analog computers, and control systems. After graduating from Columbia, Kálmán worked for the IBM Research Laboratory as a staff engineer. At IBM, Kálmán designed linear sampled-data control systems using quadratic performance criteria and furthered their analysis and design; during this period Kálmán began to see the emerging need for computers in large-scale systems.
Kálmán left IBM in 1958 for the Research Institute of Advanced Study (RIAS), which was headed by the Princeton mathematician Solomon Lefschetz, and where he would spend the next 6 years searching for a unified theory of control. Kálmán was ultimately successful in unifying the theory and design of linear systems using quadratic criteria for both discrete-time and continuous-time applications. It was also during his time at RIAS that Kálmán developed the “Kalman filter,” a mathematical tool for estimating unknown state variables in dynamic systems, based on measurements subject to uncertainty. Kálmán’s lectures, reports, and research notes from his time at RIAS are available in SC1680 as Series 5: RIAS Lectures and Courses Given by REK at Columbia University, and Series 6: RIAS Reports, Lectures, and Research Notes.
In 1964, Kálmán became a Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) and traveled across the country to join the departments of Electrical Engineering, Mechanical Engineering, and Operations Research at Stanford University, where the Dean of the School of Engineering since 1955, Fred Terman, had accepted a new post as University Provost while becoming a founding member of the National Academy of Engineering that same year. With Terman’s continued support, Stanford engineering’s programs were advancing and thriving; by the late 1960s, Stanford would be among the top producers of engineering PhDs in the nation.
At Stanford, Kálmán’s research efforts shifted toward the fundamental issues associated with realization theory and algebraic system theory; he would note in his later lectures, “progress or failure in engineering research in system theory has been directly linked to the progress or failure in solving the underlying purely mathematical problems, regardless of whether these problems were already the subject of a mathematical study in another unrelated context or had to be formulated ab initio.” During this time, his contributions helped shape a new field of research in modern system theory. Information regarding Kálmán’s Stanford research, courses, and lectures are available in SC1680 as Series 7: Colloquia and Seminar Lectures and Series 8: Courses Given at Appointed Universities.
In 1971, Kálmán left Stanford for the University of Florida in Gainesville to accept a position as a graduate research professor and Director of the “new” Center for Mathematical System Theory. A large number of graduate students obtained their doctorates under Kálmán and eventually became professors at various universities. In 1973, Kálmán was elected full professor and “Ad Personam” Chair of Mathematical System Theory at the ETHZ (Swiss Federal Institute of Technology) in Zurich, Switzerland. Kálmán kept both positions until his retirement.
For his contributions, Rudolf Kálmán received the IEEE Medal of Honor in 1974, the Kyoto Prize in 1985, the Steele Prize in 1986, the Charles Stark Draper Prize in 2008, and the U.S. National Medal of Science in 2009.