Mitchell Feigenbaum
American mathematical physicist (1944–2019)
Mitchell Jay Feigenbaum (December 19, 1944 – June 30, 2019) was an American mathematical physicist whose pioneering studies in chaos theory led to the discovery of the Feigenbaum constants.
Early life
Feigenbaum was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, to Jewish emigrants from Poland and Ukraine. He attended Samuel J. Tilden High School, in Brooklyn, New York, and the City College of New York. In 1964, he began his graduate studies at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Enrolling for graduate study in electrical engineering, he changed his area of study to physics. He completed his doctorate in 1970 for a thesis on dispersion relations, under the supervision of Professor Francis E. Low.
Career
After short positions at Cornell University (1970–1972) and the Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University (1972–1974), he was offered a longer-term post at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico to study turbulence in fluids. He also worked at the Santa Fe Institute. He was at Cornell from 1982 to 1986 and then joined Rockefeller University as Toyota Professor in 1987. Although a complete theory of turbulent fluids remains elusive, Feigenbaum's research paved the way for chaos theory, providing groundbreaking insight into the many dynamical systems in which scientists and mathematicians find chaotic maps.
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