Kármán

Theodore von Kármán

Born: 11 May 1881 in Budapest, Hungary
Died: 6 May 1963 in Aachen, Germany

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Von Kármán was a mathematical prodigy and his father, fearing that his son would become a freak, steered him towards engineering. He graduated in 1902 from Budapest and from 1903 to 1906 he worked at the Technical University of Budapest.

He left Budapest to study at Göttingen, where he was greatly influenced by Klein, and Paris where he watched some pioneering aviation flights which turned his interest to apply mathematics to aeronautics. In 1911 he made an analysis of the alternating double row of vortices behind a flat body in a fluid flow which is now known as Kármán's Vortex Street.

The following year Kármán accepted a post as director of the Aeronautical Institute at Aachen in Germany. He visited the USA in 1926 and four years later he was offered the post of director of the Aeronautical Laboratory at California Institute of Technology. Despite his love for Aachen, the political events in Germany persuaded him to accept.

In 1933 he founded the U.S. Institute of Aeronautical Sciences where he continued his research on fluid mechanics, turbulence theory and supersonic flight. He studied applications of mathematics to engineering, aircraft structures and soil erosion.

The second of the references below is an autobiography.

References:

  1. Biography in Encyclopaedia Britannica
  2. T von Kármán and L Edson, The Wind and Beyond (1967).
  3. F L Wattendorf and F J Malina, Theodore von Kármán, 1881-1963, Astronautica Acta 10 (1964), 81.
  4. S Goldstein, Theodore von Kármán, 1881-1963, Biographical Memoirs of Fellows of the Royal Society of London 12 (1966), 335-365. 4. D S Halacy, Jr, Father of Supersonic Flight: Theodor von Kármán (1965).
  5. M H Gorn, The universal man : Theodore von Karman's life in aeronautics (Washington, 1992).
  6. W R Sears, Von Karman : fluid dynamics and other things, Physics today 39 (1986), 34-39.
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