Mathwar/Personlist/von Karman Theodore
Theodore Karman
(* May 11th 1876 in Budapest Hungary, † May 7th 1963 in Aachen Germany)
Theodore von Kármán (original Hungarian name: Szőllőskislaki Kármán Tódor) (May 11, 1881 – May 7, 1963) was a Hungarian-American engineer and physicist who was active primarily in the fields of aeronautics and astronautics. He is responsible for many key advances in aerodynamics, notably his work on supersonic and hypersonic airflow characterization.
Life
Apprehensive about developments in Europe, in 1930 he accepted the directorship of the Guggenheim Aeronautical Laboratory at the California Institute of Technology (GALCIT) and emigrated to the United States. In 1936, along with Frank Malina and Jack Parsons, he founded a company Aerojet to manufacture JATO rocket motors. He later became a naturalized citizen of the United States.
German activity during World War II increased U.S. military interest in rocket research. During the early part of 1943, the Experimental Engineering Division of the United States Army Air Forces Materiel Command forwarded to von Kármán reports from British intelligence sources describing German rockets capable of reaching more than 160 km (99 mi). In a letter dated 2 August 1943 von Kármán provided the Army with his analysis of and comments on the German program.[2]
In 1944 he and others affiliated with GALCIT founded the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, which is now a Federally funded research and development center managed and operated by Caltech under a contract from NASA. In 1946 he became the first chairman of the Scientific Advisory Group which studied aeronautical technologies for the United States Army Air Forces. He also helped found AGARD, the NATO aerodynamics research oversight group (1951), the International Council of the Aeronautical Sciences (1956), the International Academy of Astronautics (1960), and the Von Karman Institute for Fluid Dynamics in Brussels (1956).