Kalman was born and educated in Hungary, where he received a Diploma in Electrical Engineering from the Technical University in Budapest in 1952.

After graduation, he joined the then newly formed Central Research Institute for Physics of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences.

[5] Kalman's scientific career started in the Central Research Institute for Physics in Budapest, Hungary, in 1952, where he worked under the supervision of Karoly Simonyi in a group studying thermonuclear fusion.

There, in 1962, he received an appointment to the position of Professeur Associé (equivalent to Full Professor) and had the responsibility of organizing a theoretical plasma physics group at the laboratory directed by Jean-Loup Delcroix.

During the same period, he worked intermittently for the Air Force Cambridge Research Laboratories, holding the position of expert.

This result allowed them to apply the method of non-linear response theory to the longstanding problem of strongly coupled plasmas.

The resulting series of works then developed into a major research program on strongly coupled plasmas and the related Coulomb/Yukawa systems.

[16] The continued research efforts with this group on the topic of strongly coupled plasmas resulted in a number of novel findings.

Most of these works resulted from joint efforts with the computational group at the Wigner Research Centre and therefore their analytic findings are bolstered by the simulation of the behavior of the system on hand.

[24] In addition to his work on strongly coupled Coulomb systems, Kalman has contributed to two major areas of research in the field of physics of charged particles.

First, in collaboration with P. Bakshi and R. Cover, he analyzed the response and excitation spectrum of relativistic electron-positron plasma in an ultra-strong magnetic field, a scenario similar to the one that exists in pulsar atmospheres.