Theodore von Kármán

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Theodore von Kármán (1950)

Theodore von Kármán (born May 11, 1881 in Budapest , Austria-Hungary as Kármán Tódor , † May 7, 1963 in Aachen ) was a Hungarian- American physicist and aeronautical engineer. He is considered a pioneer of modern aerodynamics and aerospace and rocket research.

Life

Kármán's vortex street in the clouds caused by the Beerenberg on the island of Jan Mayen
Theodore von Kármán postage stamp, USA 1991

Von Kármán was born the third of five children and came from a respected Jewish family from Budapest. His father taught pedagogy in Budapest. Son Theodore von Kármán studied engineering from 1898 to 1902 at the Technical University of Budapest . In 1903 he worked as a university assistant and at the same time at Ganz & Cie . A scholarship enabled him to move to the University of Göttingen to Ludwig Prandtl and Felix Klein in 1906 , where he obtained his doctorate in 1908 with a thesis on elasticity theory (buckling strength of bars). In 1910 he completed his habilitation in Göttingen.

In 1911 and 1912 von Kármán published his best-known work on the Kármán vortex streets that were later named after him . In Göttingen he also worked with Max Born on specific heat in the quantum theory of crystal lattices ( Born-von-Kármán model ).

With some of his early work, he is also counted among the pioneers of plasticity theory. In 1910 and 1913 he wrote the articles on strength theory in the Encyclopedia of Mathematical Sciences (partly with August Föppl ) and in 1910 he invented the triaxial device . Even in the 1920s, he still published works on the theory of plasticity.

In 1913 he followed a call to the "Royal Rheinisch-Westphälische Polytechnische Schule" in Aachen (today: RWTH Aachen University ), where from then on he headed the Institute for Mechanics and Aerodynamics (today Institute for General Mechanics ). During this time he lived in neighboring Vaals in the Netherlands .

Towards the end of the First World War , von Kármán, together with the designers Stephan Petróczy von Petrócz and Wilhelm Zurovec, carried out successful flight tests on behalf of the Austro-Hungarian Army with the PKZ-1 and PKZ-2 screw tether planes named after them . Such vertically ascending aircraft were intended to replace the tethered balloons that had been used up until then for enemy observation. The PKZ-2 reached an altitude of around 50 meters, which was a record at the time. The device crashed during a demonstration flight on June 10, 1918 in Fischamend . The end of the war prevented further development.

In 1919 von Kármán was a close associate of Béla Fogarasi in the main department for higher education in the Hungarian Soviet Republic .

In 1920, founded by Kármán together with Wolfgang Klemperer the Flight Research Association Aachen , one still active in the aerospace research team of students from the RWTH. Von Kármán designed the FVA-1 “Schwatze Düvel” glider together with Klemperer on the occasion of the “first Rhön gliding and gliding competition ”, which Klemperer was able to finish victoriously with his design.

From 1926 he began to relocate his research activities to the USA . There he worked at the California Institute of Technology , where he took over the management of the Aeronautical Laboratory in 1929 and held it until 1949. At first he commuted back and forth between the USA and Germany. In 1933 von Kármán applied for a leave of absence in Aachen, which was granted to him if he then stayed in Aachen for at least a full year of studies.

In the spring of 1933, denunciation measures by the student body also began at RWTH Aachen University . The ASTA ( General Student Committee ) and the student leaders sent the denunciation committee specially set up for this purpose, consisting of Hermann Bonin , Hubert Hoff , Felix Rötscher , Adolf Wallichs , and Robert Hans Wentzel , with information about which of the lecturers and professors were "non-Aryan" were or supposedly or actually had an undesirable political attitude. According to the law for the restoration of the civil service, von Kármán was supposed to be together with the other non-“Aryan” professors Otto Blumenthal , Arthur Guttmann , Walter Maximilian Fuchs , Ludwig Hopf , Paul Ernst Levy , Karl Walter Mautner , Alfred Meusel , Leopold due to his Jewish origin Karl Pick , Rudolf Ruer , Hermann Salmang and Ludwig Strauss have their teaching permits withdrawn. In 1934 he was officially dismissed from civil service. Despite the dismissal, the German aviation ministry wanted to hire the aerodynamics expert as a consultant, but von Kármán refused.

In Pasadena , California , von Kármán set up the Jet Propulsion Laboratory . He was an advisor to the US Air Force and founded the Aerospace Medicine Panel of the Advisory Group of Aerospace Research and Development (AGARD), a NATO aerospace research organization . In 1942 he founded the Aerojet General Corporation. It became one of the world's leading manufacturers of missile technology.

From its founding in 1956 until his death, von Kármán was the director of the Von Karman Institute for Fluid Mechanics in Belgium . He died in 1963 while taking a cure in Aachen.

Honors and Membership

RWTH Aachen University has an auditorium complex called the Kármán Auditorium , a student dormitory of the Aachen student union bears his name, and the student newspaper has also chosen his name as theirs. There is also a “Kármánstraße” at RWTH Aachen University. The so-called Kármán line , the imaginary boundary to space , was also named after him .

In 1928 he gave a plenary lecture at the International Congress of Mathematicians in Bologna (Mathematical Problems of Modern Aerodynamics).

Theodore von Kármán was an honorary member or member of 41 national scientific societies from twelve different countries and was awarded an honorary doctorate 28 (29?) Times, including three German universities.

In addition, he has received more than thirty different honors and special awards. In 1946 he received the Medal for Merit , at that time the highest civilian honor in the USA. Since 1938 he was a member of the National Academy of Sciences . In 1941 von Kármán was elected to the American Philosophical Society and in 1948 to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences . In 1961 he was awarded the James Watt Medal . He was the first scientist to be awarded the National Medal of Science by American President John F. Kennedy in 1963 for his services to science, technology and education .

In 1956 he became a member of the International Council of the Aeronautical Sciences (ICAS) and 1960 of the International Academy of Astronautics . ICAS awards the Von Kármán Medal for International Cooperation in Aeronautics - around September 1994 to the ETW wind tunnel .

In 1991, the American Post Office issued a special postage stamp in honor of his 110th birthday. In his honor the Von Karman Medal (for technical mechanics) and the Theodore von Kármán Prize (for applied mathematics) are awarded.

The Von Kármán crater on the moon and a Martian crater are named after Theodore von Kármán . He is also the namesake for the island of Kármán Island in the Antarctic.

The German sculptor Bernhard Halbreiter (1881–1940) created an approximately 50 cm bronze bust of von Kármán in 1933.

literature

Web links

Commons : Theodore von Kármán  - collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Theodore von Kármán in the Mathematics Genealogy Project (English)Template: MathGenealogyProject / Maintenance / id used
  2. ↑ Karman On Elastic Limit States , Proc. 1. Internat. Congress Applied Mechanics 1924, contribution to the theory of the rolling process , Z. Angew. Math. Mechanik, Volume 5, 1925, pp. 139-141
  3. ↑ page of the Institute for Mechanics www.iam.rwth-aachen.de (access = 2011-03-18)
  4. ↑ Johann Werfring: The tied kuk high-flyer article in the “Wiener Zeitung” from September 25, 2014, supplement “ProgrammPunkte”, p. 7.
  5. ^ Walter J. Boyne: How the Helicopter changed modern Warfare , New York 2011, ISBN 978-1-58980-700-6 , p. 312. online
  6. ↑ Gyula Borbándi: The cultural policy of the Hungarian Soviet Republic (PDF; 1.6 MB), p. 177, in: Hungary year book. Journal for interdisciplinary hungarology . Edited by Zsolt K. Lengyel, Volume 5, 1973 ISBN 3-929906-40-6
  7. ^ History . In: FVA . March 5, 2016 ( akaflieg.de [accessed February 8, 2017]).
  8. ↑ FVA 1 . In: FVA . March 7, 2016 ( akaflieg.de [accessed February 8, 2017]).
  9. ^ History. From Karman's Institute of Fluid Mechanics , accessed December 27, 2014 .
  10. ^ Member Directory: Theodore von Karman. National Academy of Sciences, accessed December 14, 2015 (Biographical Memoir by Hugh L. Dryden).
  11. ↑ Member History: Theodore von Kármán. American Philosophical Society, accessed October 18, 2018 .
  12. ^ Members of the American Academy. Listed by election year, 1900-1949 ( PDF ). Retrieved October 11, 2015
  13. ↑ ETW - European Transsonic Windtunnel (Brochure PDF) accessed June 10, 2019.
  14. ↑ MARS, VON KARMAN ( Memento of the original from May 10, 2010 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. mars_gazetteer, nssdcftp.gsfc.nasa.gov (access = 2010-04-16) @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / nssdcftp.gsfc.nasa.gov
personal data
SURNAME Kármán, Theodore von
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Kármán, Tódor
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Hungarian pioneer of modern aerodynamics and aeronautical research
DATE OF BIRTH May 11, 1881
PLACE OF BIRTH Budapest
DATE OF DEATH May 7, 1963
Place of death Aachen