Theodore von Karman

Theodore von Karman was a Hungarian-American aerospace engineer and physicist regarded as one of the twentieth century's leading authorities on aerodynamics, particularly the behavior of air at supersonic and hypersonic speeds. From 1930 he directed the Guggenheim Aeronautical Laboratory at the California Institute of Technology, and in 1938 he co-founded the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, serving as its first director until 1944. His theoretical contributions, including the Karman vortex street describing the pattern of swirling eddies shed behind an object in a fluid flow, remain foundational to fluid dynamics, and the internationally recognized boundary of space, the Karman line, is named for his calculation of the altitude at which conventional aircraft can no longer generate enough lift to fly. He helped found the NATO aerospace research group AGARD in 1951 and became, in 1962, the first recipient of the United States National Medal of Science.