June 2, 2010 - Reston, Va. - The Guggenheim Board of Award is pleased to announce that the 2010 Daniel Guggenheim Medal has been won by Arthur E. Bryson, professor emeritus of aeronautics and astronautics at Stanford University, Stanford, Calif. Prof. Bryson will receive the award on June 13, 2010, during the commencement exercises of Stanford's department of aeronautics and astronautics.
The award recognizes Bryson for "a lifetime of seminal contributions to real systems, creating and applying practical optimal control and estimation techniques to airplanes, rotorcraft, and missiles." Bryson showed that optimal control was a practical and effective means of designing control systems for aeronautical applications. His work introduced important concepts to the field of optimal estimation, including optimal smoothing techniques for reconstructing trajectories after the fact, and optimal control solutions for systems with random disturbances rather than the white noise assumed in earlier work. Modern guided missile control algorithms are still primarily based on Bryson's work as a consultant to Raytheon Corp. in the 1960s.
An AIAA Honorary Fellow, Bryson is a past recipient of the AIAA Pendray Award for Aerospace Literature, the AIAA Mechanics and Control of Flight Award, the AIAA Dryden Lectureship in Research, and the ASME Rufus Oldenburger Award, among many others. He is a member of the National Academy of Engineering and the National Academy of Sciences, and was chair of the Aeronautics and Space Engineering Board of the National Research Council from 1976 to 1978.
Established in 1929, the Daniel Guggenheim Medal is jointly presented by the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AIAA), the American Society of Mechanical Engineering (ASME), the American Helicopter Society, and the Society of Automotive Engineers, to recognize individuals for notable achievements in the advancement of aeronautics.
