Theodore von Kármán

Theodore von Kármán was a Hungarian-American mathematician, aerospace engineer and physicist who worked in aeronautics and astronautics, born in Budapest in 1881 as Kármán Tódor. He was responsible for crucial advances in aerodynamics characterizing supersonic and hypersonic airflow, and the defined threshold of outer space is named the Kármán line in recognition of his work. In his last year at the Minta Gymnasium he won the Eötvös Prize as the best student in mathematics and science in the whole of Hungary, and he graduated in 1902 with a degree in mechanical engineering from the Royal Joseph Technical University in Budapest. He is regarded as an outstanding aerodynamic theoretician of the 20th century.