1881 - 1963
Engineer Dynamicist

The Road to California.

Theodore von Karman, born to a middle-class Jewish family, grew up in Budapest, Hungary. By the time he was six it was discovered that he had a gift for mathematics, able to calculate multiplications instantly and develop solutions to factor problems. His father, afraid that his son would waste his resources on pointless arithmetic tricks, ordered him to drop any interest in the subject for several years and to concentrate on the parental curriculum, which included history, geography, literature, and the study of six languages. By the time he was allowed to return to his mathematical interest, he had lost the capacity to calculate rapidly, and even when he regained some of it, the skill remained restricted to operations in Hungarian. In the meantime he developed an early interest in dynamics and applied mechanics, but when the time...