World-famous engineer and mathematican Rudolf Kálmán passed away, news agency MTI reported. The legendary Hungarian-born inventor of the so-called “Kálmán filter”, a mathematical technique widely used in the digital computers of control systems, navigation systems, avionics, and outer-space vehicles, died last Saturday at the age of 86, the Hungarian Academy of Sciences told MTI.

Rudolf Kálmán was born in Budapest in 1930 but emigrated to the United States in 1943 where he studied electrical engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He received his doctoral degree at the Columbia University in New York City in 1957. His most famous scientific invention, the “Kálmán filter”, was used during the Apollo program as well as in the NASA Space Shuttle, in US Navy submarines, and in aerospace weapons, such as cruise missiles.

During his outstanding scientific career Rudolf Kálmán worked as a leading researcher in Baltimore and Zürich and also as a professor at Stanford University (1964-1971) and at the University of Florida (1971-1992). He was a member of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, the American National Academy of Engineering. He was a foreign member of the Hungarian, French, and Russian Academies of Sciences and he was awarded several honorary doctorates and prizes across the world.

via MTI and index.hu