On December 16, Mr. Miklós Réthelyi, Minister of National Human Resources, awarded Dr. Charles Simonyi the Kármán Tódor award for 2011. Four other individuals and organizations were also recognized. The Kármán Tódor award was established in 2000 by the Minister of Education and Culture to recognize the contributions of individuals and corporations in supporting Hungary’s scientific, educational and research programs.
Kármán Tódor (1881 – 1963) was a Hungarian-American mathematician, aerospace engineer and physicist who was active primarily in the fields of aeronautics and astronautics. He is responsible for many key advances in aerodynamics, notably his work on supersonic and hypersonic airflow characterization. He is regarded as the outstanding aerodynamic theoretician of the 20th century.
Dr. Simonyi’s acceptance remarks were delivered by his brother Tamás. In his speech he expressed his gratitude and stated: “Kármán was one of the outstanding Hungarians whose careers spanned the world, starting with Budapest, then Germany, and culminating in the United States. His name is as bright in aeronautics as Neumann’s is in mathematics and Szilard, Wiegner, and Teller are in physics. Their accomplishments testify to some mysterious intellectual environment in Budapest around the beginning of the 20th century when outstanding talent was grown in the hothouses of excellent educational institutions – gimnaziums and universities, strong and successful families, and dedicated and talented teachers.” The full text of Dr. Simonyi’s remarks is attached.
The award recognizes Dr. Simonyi for his funding of research scholarship awards in the amount of 120 million Hungarian forints since 2000, and the Karoly Simonyi prize to recognize excellence in physics and technical education in the amount of 60 million Hungarian forints, and for his donation of $525,000 to support the rehabilitation of the 100 year old Semmelweis University Lecture Hall. All of these projects were administered through the Hungarian American Coalition in partnership with the Hungarian Academy of Sciences and the Magyary Zoltán Public Foundation for Higher Education.
Award acceptance remarks by Dr. Charles Simonyi
The Kármán Tódor medal is a great honor for me. Kármán was one of the outstanding Hungarians whose careers spanned the world, starting with Budapest, then Germany, and culminating in the United States. His name is as bright in aeronautics as Neumann’s is in mathematics and Szilard, Wiegner, and Teller are in physics. Their accomplishments testify to some mysterious intellectual environment in Budapest around the beginning of the 20th century when outstanding talent was grown in the hothouses of excellent educational institutions – gimnaziums and universities, strong and successful families, and dedicated and talented teachers.
If I could meet Prof. Karman, I would have a lot of questions to ask him about his early years and his carrier. But what would I tell him that could interest or surprise him? He probably talked to many people who flew at supersonic speeds. He would have definitely enjoyed flying the Concorde although there one could not notice anything remarkable – which is in a way remarkable in itself. When I was flying the Soyuz rocket, the passing through the sound barrier meant that the shockwave moved down the fuselage relatively slowly and I could hear this as if a “squad of crazy drummers were marching by” as I described it in my blog. He might enjoy hearing that but would not be surprised and would probably cite one of his own equations to express the relative speed of the crazy drummers.
He was also well acquainted with computers and their theoretical capabilities. The bigger of the two computers at Caltech at the time of his death had as much as a quarter megabyte of memory, in an enormously costly and powerful IBM installation, obviously millions of times smaller than what is there today. My point is that if anything would astonish him about the technology at the conclusion of the 20th century, it would be the internet and the personal computer revolution. It is truly beyond anything that even the science fiction writers have projected for this era and it is something that my generation can be justifiably proud of. So to the extent that I made some modest contributions to this global phenomenon, maybe he would enjoy our interchange and would not mind that the award in his name has gone to me this year.
Thank you again, also in behalf of my whole family, this distinction.