The

Baltimore Baltimore ( , locally: or ) is the List of municipalities in Maryland, most populous city in the U.S. state of Maryland, fourth most populous city in the Mid-Atlantic (United States), Mid-Atlantic, and List of United States cities by popula ...

-based Research Institute for Advanced Studies (RIAS), not to be confused with the better-known

Institute for Advanced Study The Institute for Advanced Study (IAS), located in Princeton, New Jersey, in the United States, is an independent center for theoretical research and intellectual inquiry. It has served as the academic home of internationally preeminent scholar ...

in Princeton, New Jersey, was among the several centers for research in the mathematical and physical sciences established throughout the United States after World War II. In recognition of the critical role that fundamental scientific research played in the outcome of that war. Although not as well known as other similar institutes, such as the IAS mentioned above, or the

RAND Corporation The RAND Corporation (from the phrase "research and development") is an American nonprofit global policy think tank created in 1948 by Douglas Aircraft Company to offer research and analysis to the United States Armed Forces. It is financ ...

, it nevertheless made significant contributions to the sciences of systems and control theory, and various branches of mathematics, during its 18-year existence. The Research Institute for Advanced Studies (sometimes referred to in the singular) was founded in 1955 by George Bunker of the

Glenn L. Martin Company The Glenn L. Martin Company—also known as The Martin Company from 1957-1961—was an American aircraft and aerospace manufacturing company founded by aviation pioneer Glenn L. Martin, and operated between 1917-1961. The Martin Company produce ...

, the ancestor of the aerospace giant Lockheed Martin. Its founding was the idea of George Bunker, who took over from Glenn Martin as chairman of that company in 1952. Like the leaders of other aircraft companies in the United States, Bunker recognized that the future of aviation lay in applying new ideas of fundamental research in mathematics, electronics, and physics that had been developed during World War II. Bunker established the Institute in

, Maryland, specifically chartered to support fundamental research. The RIAS's first Director was Welcome W. Bender.William B. Harwood, ''Raise Heaven and Earth: The Story of Martin-Marietta People and Their Pioneering Achievements'', (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1993), pp. 283-284. The Institute distinguished itself as one of the world's leading centers of mathematical research, especially in control and

systems theory Systems theory is the interdisciplinary study of systems, i.e. cohesive groups of interrelated, interdependent components that can be natural or human-made. Every system has causal boundaries, is influenced by its context, defined by its structu ...

. Among the mathematicians on its staff were

Solomon Lefschetz Solomon Lefschetz (russian: Соломо́н Ле́фшец; 3 September 1884 – 5 October 1972) was an American mathematician who did fundamental work on algebraic topology, its applications to algebraic geometry, and the theory of non-linear ...

and

Rudolf E. Kálmán Rudolf Emil Kálmán (May 19, 1930 – July 2, 2016) was a Hungarian-American electrical engineer, mathematician, and inventor. He is most noted for his co-invention and development of the Kalman filter, a mathematical algorithm that is widel ...

(who while at the Institute in 1960 published a famous paper that was the basis for the

Kalman Filter For statistics and control theory, Kalman filtering, also known as linear quadratic estimation (LQE), is an algorithm that uses a series of measurements observed over time, including statistical noise and other inaccuracies, and produces estima ...

, a technique for extracting information from a noisy channel that finds applications in many facets of modern life), as well as Joseph P. LaSalle (who in 1960 published a paper describing LaSalle's invariance principle), Jack K. Hale, Harold J. Kushner, Walter Murray Wonham and others. While at RIAS in the early 1960s, Rodney Driver undertook research on

delay differential equation In mathematics, delay differential equations (DDEs) are a type of differential equation in which the derivative of the unknown function at a certain time is given in terms of the values of the function at previous times. DDEs are also called tim ...

s and their applications. The RIAS changed its name and turned its mission away from basic research in 1973, after the merger that produced the

Martin Marietta The Martin Marietta Corporation was an American company founded in 1961 through the merger of Glenn L. Martin Company and American-Marietta Corporation. In 1995, it merged with Lockheed Corporation to form Lockheed Martin. History Martin Ma ...

Corporation.

References

External links

The Kalman Filter
{{DEFAULTSORT:Research Institute For Advanced Studies Research institutes in Maryland Mathematical institutes