When I saw the photo of Rudolf Kalman as a young man (at IEEE History Center) it brought back old and fond memories of a course on “Nonlinear Control Systems” he taught at Columbia University in 1957, and which I attended together with Claude Villars. Both of us were former members of Prof. Tank’s Hochfrequenzinstitut at the ETH and then employed at Bell Labs in Murray Hill, N.J. The Labs allowed us to take time off from work to travel once a week to Manhattan for some postgraduate education. Kalman’s course opened our eyes to a new approach for analyzing nonlinear problems, by breaking up nonlinearities into linear segments and then using matrices to solve the resulting linear systems. After fifty years I like to say hello again and congratulate Rudolf Kalman for receiving the prestigious Draper Price of 2008. Adolf J. Giger Dr.El.Ing. ETH Boxford, MA USA P.S. If the message gets through, my thanks to Peter Rüegg for telling me to use Firefox (instead of Safari).

Adolf J. Giger - 17.01.08

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