Theodore von Kármán (Hungarian: (szőllőskislaki) Kármán Tódor [(søːløːʃkiʃlɒki) ˈkaːrmaːn ˈtoːdor], May 11, 1881 – May 6, 1963) was a Hungarian-American mathematician, aerospace engineer, and physicist who worked in aeronautics and astronautics. He was responsible for crucial advances in aerodynamics characterizing supersonic and hypersonic airflow. The defined threshold of outer space is named the "Kármán line" in recognition of his work. Kármán is regarded as an outstanding aerodynamic theoretician of the 20th century.
Theodore von Kármán was born into a Jewish family in Budapest, then part of Austria-Hungary, as Kármán Tódor, the son of Helene (Konn or Kohn, Hungarian: Kohn Ilka) and Mór Kármán. Among his ancestors were Rabbi Judah Loew ben Bezalel, who was said to be the creator of the Golem of Prague, and Rabbi Moses Kunitz, who wrote about the Zohar. His father, Mór, was a well-known educator, who reformed the Hungarian school system and founded Minta Gymnasium in Budapest. He became an influential figure and became a commissioner of the Ministry of Education, and was responsible for "planning an education of a young archduke, the Emperor's cousin". In 1907 Mór Kármán was ennobled, Theodore later described it:
To receive a predicate of nobility, my father had to be landed. Fortunately he owned a small vineyard near Budapest, so the Emperor bestowed upon him the predicate "von Szőllőskislaki" (small grape). I have shortened it to von, for even to me, a Hungarian, the full title is almost unpronounceable.
Theodore had three brothers (among them Elemér Kármán) and one sister, Josephine. At age six, he could "perform large mental calculations", for example multiplication of six-digit numbers. His father discouraged Theodore's mathematical education, as he was afraid his son would be a child prodigy and a freak. He was tutored by his father and his father's former student; later he entered the Minta Gymnasium in Budapest. He won Eötvös Prize "for the best student in mathematics and science in the whole of Hungary" in his last year at Minta.
He studied engineering at the city's Royal Joseph Technical University (Budapest University of Technology and Economics). He graduated in 1902 with a degree in mechanical engineering, his thesis was "The motion of a heavy rod supported on its rounded end by a horizontal plane". He then served a year as an artillery cadet in the Austro-Hungarian army. In 1903-1906 he worked as an assistant at the Royal Joseph Technical University. In 1906 he moved to the German Empire and joined Ludwig Prandtl at the University of Göttingen, where he received his doctorate in 1908, for his research on "mathematical models for the buckling of large structures". He taught at Göttingen for four years. In 1913 he accepted a position as director of the Aeronautical Institute at RWTH Aachen University, a leading German university. His time at RWTH Aachen was interrupted by service in the Austro-Hungarian Army from 1915 to 1918, during World War I, when he designed the Petróczy-Kármán-Žurovec, an early helicopter.
After the war, in 1919, he returned to Aachen with his mother and sister Josephine. Some of his students took an interest in gliding and saw the competitions of the Rhön-Rossitten Gesellschaft as an opportunity to advance in aeronautics. Kármán engaged Wolfgang Klemperer to design a competitive glider.
Josephine encouraged her brother Theodore to expand his science beyond national boundaries. They organized the first international conference in mechanics held in September 1922 in Innsbruck. Subsequent conferences were organized as the International Union of Theoretical and Applied Mechanics.
In 1926, von Kármán was first invited to the US by the California Institute of Technology to build a wind tunnel. In 1930 he was invited for a position of a full-time director of the Guggenheim Aeronautical Laboratory at California Institute of Technology (GALCIT); his mother and sister, Josephine, also moved to California.
Apprehensive about developments in Europe regarding Nazism, in 1930 Kármán accepted the directorship of the Guggenheim Aeronautical Laboratory at the California Institute of Technology (GALCIT). The directorship included provision for a research assistant, and he selected Frank Wattendorf, an American who had been studying for three years in Aachen.
Another student Ernest Edwin Sechler took up the problem of making reliable airframes for aircraft, and with von Kármán's support, developed an understanding of aeroelasticity.
The US Army Air Force wanted Caltech to manufacture JATO rockets, but Caltech was not interested in operating in industry. In 1936, von Kármán engaged the legal services of Andrew G. Haley to form the Aerojet Corporation, with his graduate student Frank Malina and their experimental rocketry collaborators Jack Parsons and Edward Forman to manufacture JATO rocket motors. von Kármán later became a naturalized citizen of the United States.
In 1940, von Kármán was selected by John M. Carmody, Administrator of the Federal Works Agency to be on the Board of Engineers tasked with investigating the November 7, 1940, collapse of the Tacoma Narrows Bridge outside Tacoma, Washington. His expertise was instrumental in discovering the effect of aerodynamic forces on the bridge, causing its unusual "galloping" behavior and eventual collapse. Along with Civil Engineers Othmar Amman and Glenn B. Woodruff, he published the report "The Failure of the Tacoma Narrows Bridge" on March 28, 1941.
German activity during World War II increased US military interest in rocket research. In early 1943, the Experimental Engineering Division of the United States Army Air Forces Material Command forwarded to von Kármán reports from British intelligence sources describing German rockets capable of travelling more than 100 miles (160 km). In a letter dated August 2, 1943, von Kármán provided the Army with his analysis of and comments on the German program.
In 1944 he and others affiliated with GALCIT founded the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), which is now a federally funded research and development center managed and operated by Caltech under a contract from NASA. In 1946 he became the first chairman of the Scientific Advisory Group 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 for Fluid Dynamics in Sint-Genesius-Rode, south of Brussels (1956).
He eventually became an important figure in supersonic motion, noting in a seminal paper that aeronautical engineers were "pounding hard on the closed door leading into the field of supersonic motion."
In June 1944, von Kármán underwent surgery for intestinal cancer in New York City. The surgery caused two hernias, and von Kármán's recovery was slow. Early in September, while still in New York, he met US Army Air Forces Commanding General Henry H. Arnold on a runway at LaGuardia Airport, and Arnold then proposed that von Kármán should move to Washington, D.C., to lead the Scientific Advisory Group and become a long-range planning consultant to the military. von Kármán returned to Pasadena around mid-September, was appointed to the SAG position on October 23, 1944, and left Caltech in December 1944.
At the age of 81 von Kármán was the recipient of the first National Medal of Science, bestowed in a White House ceremony by President John F. Kennedy. He was recognized, "For his leadership in the science and engineering basic to aeronautics; for his effective teaching and related contributions in many fields of mechanics, for his distinguished counsel to the Armed Services, and for his promoting international cooperation in science and engineering."
von Kármán never married. He died on a trip to Aachen, West Germany, in 1963, five days short of his 82nd birthday, and his body was returned to the United States to be entombed in the Beth Olam Mausoleum at what is now the Hollywood Forever Cemetery. He has sometimes been described as one of The Martians.