22/07/2019

Mitchell Feigenbaum, pioneer of Chaos Theory, dies.

Mitchell J. Feigenbaum (Rockefeller University)

American physicist and mathematician Mitchell Jay Feigenbaum, a pioneer in the study of Chaos Theory, died in New York on the last day of June this year, at the age of 74. The scientist's groundbreaking work resulted in advances in fields as diverse as cardiology and cartography, to name just two of the areas influenced by his research on chaos.

In October, IMPA will host a lecture disseminating the research developed by Feigenbaum, who was a professor and director of the Center for Studies in Physics and Biology at Rockefeller University, where he worked since 1986. Thanks to him, it is known that, in Physics and Mathematics, distinct phenomena can present certain important characteristics in common, the so-called Feigenbaum constants. This discovery was also obtained independently by the Frenchmen P. Coullet and C. Tresser, and is called the Feigenbaum-Coullet-Tresser universality.

"The discovery of universality in period-doubling bifurcations constitutes a milestone in the history of dynamical systems, whose effects reverberate to this day," highlighted the Director-General of IMPA, Marcelo Viana.

Born in Philadelphia (Pennsylvania, on the east coast of the United States), Feigenbaum joined the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in 1964, where he completed his doctorate in Physics in 1970.

In 1983, he received the MacArthur Fellowship, an annual award from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation. Three years later, he was awarded the Wolf Prize in Physics for his pioneering theoretical research, which demonstrated the universal nature of nonlinear systems, thus enabling the systematic study of chaos.