Obituary for Professor Rudolf Emil Kalman

Professor Rudolf E. Kalman, formerly graduate research professor and director of the Center for Mathematical System Theory at the University of Florida in Gainesville, Florida and the chair for Mathematical SystemTheory at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) in Zürich, Switzerland passed away peacefully in the morning of July 2, 2016, at his home in Gainesville, Florida. He was 86 years old. Rudolf Kalman was born in Budapest, Hungary, on May 19, 1930. He emigrated to the United States and received his bachelor’s (B.S.) and master’s (M.S.) degrees in Electrical Engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1953 and 1954, respectively, and his doctoral degree (D. Sci.) from Columbia University in 1957. In 1958 through 1964, as a research mathematician at the Research Institute for Advanced Study (R.I.A.S.) in Baltimore, Maryland he produced a series of groundbreaking contributions that shaped the field of Mathematical System Theory and of Control Engineering. Chief amongst thosewas the ‘‘Kalman filter’’, amathematical framework and an algorithm that enables navigation and control in virtually all modern-day apparatuses, from airplanes to satellites and from mobile phones to magnetic resonance imaging. In particular, in its early days, the Kalman filter proved pivotal in the success of the Apollo program that sent the first humans to the moon (Apollo 11, 1969). Fifty years since his seminal paper entitled ‘‘A new approach to linear filtering and prediction problems’’, the Kalman filter continues to find new applications in those fields as varied as weather forecasting, stock picking, econometrics, GPS, computer vision, autopilots, structural health monitoring, seismology and motor control. After R.I.A.S., Rudolf Kalman became a professor at Stanford University (1964–1971). From 1971 to 1992 he was a graduate research professor and director of the Center for Mathematical System Theory at the University of Florida in Gainesville. Simultaneously, he held the chair for Mathematical System Theory at the ETH in Zürich from 1973 until his retirement in 1997. He received numerous awards, including the IEEE Medal of