Theodore von Karman

His father made a point of holding him back. Mor Karman reformed Hungary's school system and founded the Minta Gymnasium in Budapest, and when his six-year-old son turned out to be able to multiply six-digit numbers in his head, he steered the boy away from mathematics rather than exhibit him. The son won the national Eotvos Prize anyway, finished mechanical engineering at Budapest's Royal Joseph Technical University in 1902, served a year as an artillery cadet, and in 1906 left for Gottingen and Ludwig Prandtl, who was then building modern fluid mechanics. A doctorate on buckling followed in 1908. By 1913 he directed the aeronautical institute at Aachen, and the war put him back in Austro-Hungarian uniform, designing an early helicopter.

Caltech gave him the Guggenheim Aeronautical Laboratory in 1930. He took it, left a Europe whose politics alarmed him, and made it the center of American aerodynamics. The student rocket group he sponsored, the Suicide Squad, became the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. He co-founded Aerojet in 1942 and chaired the Army Air Forces Scientific Advisory Group, whose 1945 report Toward New Horizons set the American agenda for supersonic flight and missiles. Wernher von Braun reached America in 1945 as a captured German asset. Von Karman had come 15 years earlier, by invitation, and built the institutions von Braun's rockets flew from.

The thing that carries his name is a pattern in moving water. Put a blunt object in a flow and the wake behind it does not close smoothly. It sheds swirls alternately from one side and then the other, in two staggered rows, and at Gottingen in 1911 and 1912 he worked out why that arrangement holds together. The Karman vortex street is why chimneys sway, why cables hum and why a car antenna buzzes at one particular speed. He credited Arnulph Mallock and Henri Benard with seeing it before him. It was also blamed for the Tacoma Narrows bridge collapse of 1940, which he investigated for the federal government. That explanation is now rejected, including by the report he signed, which called resonance with alternating vortices improbable. Engineers point to aeroelastic flutter instead.

The roster of his students is the strongest thing he left. Frank Malina ran the rocket group. Qian Xuesen, deported in 1955, became the architect of China's missile program. Ernest Sechler, Chia-Chiao Lin and Frank Wattendorf took much of the rest. On February 18, 1963, at 81, he accepted the first National Medal of Science from John F. Kennedy, who called him the one man who represented science, engineering and education at once. He died in Aachen 11 weeks later, five days short of 82. He never married. His sister Josephine, called Pipo, kept his household in Aachen and Pasadena until her death in 1951. The conventional edge of space, 100 kilometers up, is the Karman line.

Theodore von Karman's life against the full span of the corpus.

• The Karman vortex street discovery
  The staggered double row of vortices shed behind a blunt body, analyzed at Gottingen in 1911 and 1912 1911
• Guggenheim Aeronautical Laboratory at Caltech other
  Directed from 1930 and built into the center of American aerodynamics 1930
• Aerojet Engineering Corporation other
  Incorporated March 19, 1942, with von Karman as its first president 1942
• Jet Propulsion Laboratory other
  Grew out of the GALCIT rocket group he sponsored. The name was attached in November 1943 1944
• Toward New Horizons book
  The Army Air Forces report that set the postwar agenda for supersonic flight and missiles 1945
• The Wind and Beyond book
  Autobiography written with Lee Edson and published four years after his death 1967

• May 11, 1881 aged 0 Born in Budapest to Mor Karman, reformer of Hungarian schooling His father founded the Minta Gymnasium and later became a commissioner in the Ministry of Education.
• 1908 aged ~27 Takes a doctorate at Gottingen under Ludwig Prandtl The dissertation was on mathematical models for the buckling of large structures.
• 1911 aged ~30 Publishes the analysis of the alternating vortex wake Two papers at Gottingen, in 1911 and 1912. He credited Arnulph Mallock and Henri Benard with observing the pattern before him.
• 1913 aged ~32 Becomes director of the Aeronautical Institute at Aachen Interrupted from 1915 by service in the Austro-Hungarian army, where he worked on the Petroczy-Karman-Zurovec helicopter.
• 1930 aged ~49 Moves to Caltech to direct the Guggenheim Aeronautical Laboratory He had first come over in 1926 to build a wind tunnel. His mother and his sister Josephine moved with him.
• March 28, 1941 aged 59 Signs the federal report on the Tacoma Narrows bridge collapse With Othmar Ammann and Glenn B. Woodruff. The board called resonance with alternating vortices improbable.
• March 19, 1942 aged 60 Aerojet Engineering Corporation is incorporated Von Karman was president, Frank Malina treasurer, Andrew Haley secretary. Haley put up all the initial capital.
• October 23, 1944 aged 63 Appointed to lead the Army Air Forces Scientific Advisory Group General Henry H. Arnold had proposed it on a runway at LaGuardia. He left Caltech that December.
• February 18, 1963 aged 81 Receives the first National Medal of Science from President Kennedy He was 81. He died in Aachen 11 weeks later, on May 6, 1963.

• Wernher von Braun 1912–1977
  German-American aerospace engineer who led the development of the Saturn V rocket that took humans to the Moon. counterpart
• Leo Szilard 1898–1964
  Conceived the nuclear chain reaction, started the American bomb program, then petitioned against using it fellow Hungarian emigre
• Neil Armstrong 1930–2012
  Astronaut who commanded Apollo 11 and became the first person to set foot on the lunar surface. flew past the line named for him