February 2008

Rudolf Kalman wins this year’s Charles Stark Draper Prize

Rudolf Kalman, ETH Zürich Professor Emeritus in mathematics, has been awarded this year’s Charles Stark Draper Prize. Presented by the U.S. National Academy of Engineering, the award is in recognition of the development of the Kalman Filter, one of the most important applications of mathematics. It is a mathematical technique that strips noise from time-series analyses of data. Professor Kalman developed his theory in the late 1950s when he worked at the Research Institute for Advanced Studies in Baltimore. Various and different technologies have achieved unimagined accuracy thanks to Rudolf Kalman’s theory. The Kalman Filter was first widely utilized in the 1960s regarding aerospace and military applications such as guidance, navigation and control systems. The method was one of the techniques used by the NASA Apollo programs.

The Charles Stark Draper Prize, the engineering profession’s highest honor, can be compared in significance to the Nobel Prize in this discipline. The prize carries an award of 500’000 U.S. Dollars. It was established in 1988 at the request of the Charles Stark Draper Laboratory in Massachusetts. The honor is intended to increase public understanding of the contributions of engineering and technology. Awarded annually, the 2007 recipient of the Draper Prize was Timothy J. Berners-Lee, the inventor of the World Wide Web.

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