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Since 1974, the Club of Seniors (Seniorenrunde) ‘Neu-
maier and his friends’ have met every Thursday from 11 to
12 at the Institute of Photogrammetry in order to discuss
both important and unimportant things. And whenever
possible the members have helped the Institute or vice
versa. The very centre of this activity was Karl Neumaier.
We really miss him. On 21" May 1999 Neumaier died after
a domestic accident in his nursing home where he lived for
his last year. His goal to have lived in three centuries could
no longer be fulfilled.
In his testament he dedicated the biggest part of his prop-
erty to the Institute of Photogrammetry as a grant for the
Neumaier-Prize in order to forward young scientists in
photogrammetry, remote sensing and related fields. A life
for Photogrammetry! Let us never forget him.
Peter Waldhäusl
F. Blaschitz, M. Eckharter, A. Hochwartner, E. Hynst, K.
Kraus: Altprásident Prof. Ing. Dr.techn.h.c. Karl Neumaier
zum 100. Geburtstag. Austrian Journal of Surveying and
Geoinformation 85/1997, pp.246-251
Karl Kraus: In memoriam Altprásident Prof. Ing.
Dr.techn.h.c. Karl Neumaier (1898 — 1999). Austrian Jour-
nal of Surveying and Geoinformation 87/1999, p. 176.
Professor Dr. h.c. Hellmut H. Schmid (1914 — 1998)
On April 27th, 1998, the scientific and engineering com-
munity lost one of its foremost leaders in geodesy and
photogrammetry with the death of Dr. Hellmut H. Schmid
in Spokane, Washington.
He was born in Dresden, Germany, on September 12th,
1914, and attended the Technischen Hochschule there,
earning his undergraduate degree in 1938. In graduate
school, he studied under the tutelage of Professor R.
Hugershoff, a noted photogrammetrist, and received his
doctorate in 1941. His dissertation was entitled "Arbeit
über Modellverbiegungen durch Restfehler der relativen
Orientierung."
In 1940, Schmid joined Wernher von Braun's Group in
Peenemünde, Germany, where he was put in charge of
determining ballistic trajectories for the V1 and V2 rockets
by photogrammetric means. At the close of World War II,
he went with von Braun and his group to the U. S. Army's
White Sands Proving Ground in New Mexico, where they
continued work on the further development of the V2
rocket and its successors. Schmid transferred to the U. S.
Army's Ballistic Research Laboratory, Aberdeen Proving
Ground, in Aberdeen, Maryland in 1950, where he
remained until accepting a position at the Engineer
Research and Development Laboratory in Fort Belvoir, Vir-
ginia, in 1962. In 1963 he moved to the U. S. Coast and
Geodetic Survey in Washington, D. C., where he remained
until his retirement from the U. S. Government in 1974.
From 1974 to 1984, Schmid held the position of Professor
für Photogrammetrie at the Institut für Geodäsie und Pho-
togrammetrie, ETH Zürich.
Schmid authored more than 100 professional publications,
along with numerous other uncatalogued treatises. Among
his many outstanding contributions to the fields of pho-
togrammetry and geodesy, the following one is a typical
International Archives of Photogrammerty and Remote Sensing. Vol. XXXIII, Part A. A lam 2000.
example. In 1965 he and his colleague Erwin Schmid pre-
pared "A Generalised Least Squares Solution for Hybrid
Measuring Systems" (The Canadian Surveyor, Vol. XIX, No.
1, pp. 27-41). At the time of its publication, least squares
techniques, as practised by most geodesists, were com-
partmentalised into a number of discrete, apparently unre-
lated methods. People spoke of the method of condition
equations and the method of observation equations as an
either/or proposition. Schmid demonstrated that all such
seemingly different methods could be derived from a sin-
gle, generalised approach wherein the traditional methods
became merely special cases of the generalised approach
when certain groups of
unknowns in the solution were
or were not present. All of the
traditional equations could be
transformed into observation
equation form with all variables
treated as weighted observa-
tions. Observations with zero
weight became pure unknowns
and those with infinite weight
became constants. All others
were allowed to vary according
to the magnitude of their corre-
sponding weights.
The generalised approach greatly simplified the derivation
and application of constraint equations and the merging of
dissimilar data types into hybrid least squares systems
which are today so common in analytical photogrammetry.
Perhaps his greatest accomplishment was the part he
played in the design, execution and analysis of the World-
wide Geometric Satellite Triangulation Program, a ten-year
(64 - 74) co-operative venture involving the U. S. Coast
and Geodetic Survey, U. S. Department of Defense, NASA,
and a number of participating countries from around the
world. The goal of this programme was to determine the
relative three-dimensional positions of 45 stations evenly
distributed around the Earth, using images of sun-reflect-
ing satellites photographed simultaneously from two or
more ground-based camera stations against a star back-
ground. As Technical Director of this programme, Dr.
Schmid was personally involved with, and supervised,
every technical aspect from the formulation of the mathe-
matical models to acquisition of photography and through
to photo plate measurements, measurement reductions
and final triangulation computations. The final results
showed an rms accuracy of less than +5 meters for the 45-
station world-wide network, an accuracy unprecedented
at the start of the programme.
During his forty-year career, Dr. Schmid received more than
18 awards and assignments to chair and serve on presti-
gious international committees and consulting panels.
Among the awards were the Robert H. Kent Award (1962)
from the U. S. Army Ordnance Corps; the Fairchild Pho-
togrammetric Award (1958) and the Talbot Abrams Award
(1963, 1966) from the American Society of Photogramme-
try; the Colbert Medal (1965) from the Society of American
Military Engineers; the U. S. Department of Commerce
Gold Medal Award (1966); and the Brock Award (1968) from
the International Society of Photogrammetry.
Much has been written by and about Dr. Schmid, and many
awards and honorary degrees have been bestowed upon
him, but none of this fully describes the kind of man and
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