The Eighth Tribe, 1976 (3. évfolyam, 1-12. szám)
1976-02-01 / 2. szám
February, 1976 THE EIGHTH TRIBE Page 7 Dr. István S. Tuba: ACADEMIC NEWS During 1974, two of the largest Engineering societies in the United States, the American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME) and the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) have bestowed their highest awards on a Hungarian. We pay tribute to each of them by re-publishing here the original announcements by the respective societies. All Hungarians should be proud of their achievements. The IEEE Medal of Honor was bestowed on Dr. Rudolf E. Kalman at the annual banquet, March 27, 1974 at the Statler Hilton Hotel, New York. MEDAL OF HONOR History of the Medal of Honor Five years after the formation of the Institute of Radio Engineers, the Medal of Honor was established as its first award to recognize distinguished service in the then fledgling art of radio communication. Thus it was that the first Medal of Honor was bestowed on Major Edwin H. Armstrong in 1917. In the years that followed, the Medal of Honor became the highest award in the radio engineering profession, given only to those who had attained preeminence in the field through outstanding technical contributions. The Medal of Honor is the highest award of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers and it is presented only when a candidate is identified as having made a particular contribution which forms a clearly exceptional addition to the science and technology of concern to the Institute. Fifty-four persons have been awarded the Medal of Honor in the past fifty-seven years. Carrying on the tradition of the award and exemplifying its unique importance, Rudolf E. Kalman is awarded the Medal of Honor this year. Rudolph Kalman was born in Budapest, Hungary on May 19, 1930. The son of an electrical engineer he decided to follow in his father’s footsteps. He immigrated to the United States and obtained a Bachelor’s and Master’s degree in Electrical Engineering from M.I.T. in 1953, and 1954 respectively. He left M.I.T. and continued his studies at Columbia University where he received his ScD. in 1957 under the direction of Professor J. R. Ragazzini. His early interest in control systems was evident by his research at M.I.T. and especially at Columbia. His early research was based upon the notion of state variable representations, was mathematically advanced but motivated by practical problems. He also showed, even at these early years, a highly individual approach to research which has continued during the remainder of his brilliant career. From 1957 to 1958 he was employed as a staff engineer at the IBM Research Laboratory in Poughkeepsie, N. Y. During that period of time he made important contributions to the design of linear sampled—data control systems using quadratic performance criteria, as well as in the use of Lyapunov theory for the analysis and design of control sys-RUDOLF E. KALMAN 1974 MEDAL OF HONOR RECIPIENT “For pioneering modern methods in system theory, including concepts of controllability, observability, filtering, and algebraic structures.” terns. He forsaw at that time the importance of the digital computer for large scale systems. In 1958 he joined the Research Institute for Advanced Study (RIAS) which was started by the late Solomon Lefschetz. He started as a research mathematician and was promoted later to Associate Director of Research. It was during that period of time (1958-1964) that Kalman made some of his truly pioneering contributions to modern control theory. His lectures and publications during that time period are indicative of his tremendous creativity and his search for a unified theory of control. His research in fundamental systems concepts, such as controllability and observability, helped put on a solid theoretical basis some of the most important engineering systems structural aspects. He unified, in both the discrete-time and continuous-time case, the theory and design of linear systems with respect to quadratic criteria. He was instrumental in introducing the work of Caratheodory in opt ónál control theory, and clarifying the interrelations between Pontryagin’s maximum principle and the Hamilton- Jacobi-Bellman equation, as well as variational calculus in general. His research not only stressed mathematical generality, but in addition it was guided by the use of the digital computer as an integral part of the design process and of the control system implementations. It was also during his stay at RIAS that Kalman developed what is perhaps his most well known contribution, the so-called “Kalman filter”. He obtained results on the discretetime (sampled data) version of this problem in late 1958, and early 1959. He blended earlier fundamental work in filtering by Wiener, Kolmogorov, Bode, Shannon, Pugachev and others with the modern stage space approach. His solution to the discrete-time problem naturally led him to the continuous-time version of the problem and in 1960-1961 he developed, in collaboration with R. S. Bucy, the continuoustime version of the “Kalman filter”. The Kalman filter, and its later extensions to nonlinear problems, represents perhaps the most widely applied byproduct of modern control theory. It has been used in space vehicle navigation and control (e.g. the Appolo vehicle), radar tracking algorithms for ABM applications, process
