Henry J. Kelley (1926-1988) was Christopher C. Kraft Professor of Aerospace and Ocean Engineering at the Virginia Polytechnic Institute.
[1] In 1948, he received a Bachelor of Science from NYU in aeronautical engineering, and began to work for Grumman Aircraft in the same year.
[1] In 1963, he left Grumman (as Assistant Chief of the Research Department) and founded Analytical Mechanics Associates with two partners.
[1] In the context of control theory, Kelley derived basics of backpropagation,[3][4] now widely used for machine learning and artificial neural networks.
He was a Fellow of the AIAA, and member of the AAS, the IEEE and SIAM, and founder and first chairman of IFAC's Mathematics of Control Committee.