Physicist and aeronautical engineer, born in Budapest, Hungary. While spending most of his early career at German educational institutions, he advised many governments and firms on issues of aerodynamics and applied mechanics. Having visited the USA on two occasions, he came again in 1930 to direct the Guggenheim Aeronautical Laboratory at the California Institute of Technology, and when the Nazis forced him to resign his post in Germany, he stayed in the USA and remained as the director until 1949. He was a founder of the Aerojet Engineering Corp (1942), the RAND Corp (1948), and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and gave direction to the early stages of the American rocket and space programmes. He received the first National Medal of Science in 1963.
Theodore von Kármán (Szőllőskislaki Kármán Tódor) (May 11, 1881 – May 6, 1963) was a Hungarian-American engineer and physicist who was active primarily in the fields of aeronautics.
Von Kármán was born in Budapest, Austria-Hungary as Kármán Tódor.
Apprehensive about developments in Europe, in 1930 he accepted the directorship of the Guggenheim Aeronautical Laboratory at the California Institute of Technology and emigrated to the United States.
In 1944 he helped found the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (now a part of NASA), and became the first chairman of the Scientific Advisory Group in 1946, 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 in Brussels (1956).
Kármán's fame was in the use of mathematical tools to study fluid flow, and the interpretation of those results to guide practical designs.
Contributions
Specific contributions include theories of non-elastic buckling, unsteady wakes in circum-cylinder flow, stability of laminar flow, turbulence, airfoils in steady and unsteady flow, boundary layers, and supersonic aerodynamics. His name appears in at least the following concepts:
Foppl-von Karman equations (large deflection of elastic plates) Born-von Karman lattice model (crystallography) Chaplygin-Karman-Tsien approximation (potential flow) Falkowich-Karman equation (transonic flow) Karman constant (wall turbulence) Karman line (aerodynamics/astronautics) Karman trail (flow past obstacle) Karman-Howarth equation (turbulence) Karman-Nikuradse correlation (viscous flow) Karman-Pohlhausen parameter (boundary layers) Karman-Treffz transformation (airfoil theory) Prandtl-von Karman law (velocity in open channel flow) von Karman integral equation (boundary layers) von Karman ogive (supersonic aerodynamics) von Karman vortex street (flow past cylinder) von Karman-Tsien compressibility correction Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: Theodore von Karman
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