The Charles Stark Draper Prize, the engineering profession’s highest honors, can be compared in significance to the Nobel Prize in this discipline. The prize carries an award of $500,000. The award ceremony will take place on February 19, 2008 in Washington, D.C. The Draper Prize was bestowed upon Rudolf Kalman for his influential contribution, the eponymous Kalman Filter. It is a mathematical technique that strips noise from time-series analyses of data, and is a cornerstone in the estimation and control of dynamical systems, such as that of stock exchanges.

In its January 2, 2008 press release, the National Academy of Engineering said the Kalman Filter had revolutionized the field of control theory and that it continues to be pervasive in today’s engineering systems.

Unimagined accuracy achieved

Professor Kalman developed his theory in the late 1950s when he worked at the Research Institute for Advanced Studies in Baltimore, Maryland (US). His breakthrough was described in his paper “A New Approach to Linear Filtering and Prediction Problems” in 1960. Shortly afterwards, the native-born Hungarian published further groundbreaking works that included, among others, the concept of controllability and observability.

Various and different technologies achieve unimagined accuracy thanks to Rudolf Kalman’s ideas. The Kalman Filter began to enjoy acceptance in the 1960s with aerospace and military applications such as guidance, navigation and control systems. It was one of the techniques used in the NASA Apollo programs.

Initially viewed with scepticism by many mathematicians, the Filter quickly became an intrinsic part of the systems and technologies of nearly every branch of engineering. New applications of the Kalman Filter continue to be discovered, including for radar, global positioning systems (GPS), hydrological modelling, atmospheric observations and automated drug delivery systems.

Career end at ETH Zurich

Kalman was born in 1930 in Budapest, Hungary. He later immigrated to the US where he completed doctoral studies. From 1964 to 1971, he carried out research at Stanford University. In 1971 he became Director of the Center for Mathematical System Theory at the University of Florida, and later Head of the Center for Mathematics at ETH Zurich where he became Professor Emeritus in 1977. Professor Kalman divides his residence between Zurich and Florida. He has received numerous awards for his work in science. In 1985, he was awarded the Kyoto Prize for Technology.

The Draper Prize was established in 1988 at the request of the Charles Stark Draper Laboratory, Inc in Massachusetts (US). The prize honors the memory of “Doc” Draper, the “father of inertial navigation”, and is intended to increase public understanding of the contributions of engineering and technology. Awarded annually, the 2007 recipient of the Draper Prize was the inventor of the World Wide Web, Timothy J. Berners-Lee.