I have to wonder if the Feigenbaum constant applies to human chaos, such as that caused by Donald Trump; his rate of chaos doubling has got to be faster than by 4.669 times.
15
"heart attack". "meals full of red meat (no vegetables)". Hmm.
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@Richard Schumacher
Oh please. When you are quite sure you are as brilliant as Dr. Feigenbaum, you can weigh in.
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"He [Feigenbaum] imagined placing electrical charges on the words."
Something like that could probably be adapted to outlining congressional districts.
With his interest in mapmaking, Feigenbaum would have been an ideal person to look at the problem of gerrymandering.
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At first I thought, oh gosh mathematics; but then this guy turned out to be the most interesting AND practical Mathematical theorist I have ever encountered (the discoverer of a constant!), and that includes the string theorists That I knew of when I worked at Stanford linear Excelerator center
23
Mitch Feigenbaum perceived and figured out things that were there, but that others failed to see. Peter Carruthers did that as well with respect to Dr. Feigenbaum's talents. Genius on both counts.
24
I was in a class that Mitch Feigenbaum taught at Cornell. He was extremely intense and amazingly hard-working. Once, on a Saturday morning, he came into class and started a lecture. Seeing that the students didn't seem to be following him, he decided to give an impromptu lecture on thermodynamics. He gave a very lucid talk, rapidly filling up several chalk boards with chalk dust flying and a sweat developing on his brow.
Once, while looking out the physics library window, I saw Mitch come driving in the parking lot, not far from the location of the photograph in his obituary of him dropping papers while walking with students. He was driving what appeared to be a brand new yellow convertible Mercedes with the top down and his mane of hair blowing in the wind. It was rumored that he had bought it with prize money.
26
I first heard about Dr. Feigenbaum decades ago in the pages of Chaos, where he featured in some of Gleick's most thrilling prose. Thank you for an obituary that rounded out this great nonconformist thinker's life for me.
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What did that Los Alamos administrator see in Feigenbaum to hire him despite his "thin" resume? If not for that break, I wonder if he would have been lost to Physics as so many PhDs in Physics give up and keep moving on to other walks, some to become quants etc
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@Chandra Varanasi
This is an inversion of logic. It is widely believed that Einstein was a mediocre student at school. That does not mean that every mediocre student will become an Einstein.
And please note that Feigenbaum was a grad student at MIT and a post-doc at Cornell. You don't get to go there unless you are pretty good to begin with. Cornell physics in particular was humming with activity in the 1970's. Ken Wilson, Robert Richardson, David Lee and David Oscheroff did work that would win them all Nobels, Michael Fisher would win the Wolf prize, and many others, David Mermin, Robert Pohl, Toichiro Kinoshita, etc. would become members of the National Academy.
Again, not every person who goes to MIT or Cornell for grad school is a genius of the Feigenbaum caliber, but chances are if you are intrinsically smart, you will be noticed. And Peter Carruthers at Los Alamos was no mere "administrator." A class 1 physicist, well able to see real talent.
21
To make order out of chaos is a very rare capability indeed. I only hope that we allow such persons room to think and perceive to their greatest degree and the rest of us understand and apply those thoughts and concepts in a manner that benefits all mankind. Let the future Alan Turings of the world be celebrated for what they bring to all of us!
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The obituaries of scientists in the NYT are always a joy to read. Thanks again.
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@John This obituary moved me tremendously. We need to keep looking at the beauty of things, with love and interest, in order to deal with the hard political times we face now.
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Everything is predetermined.
There is no chaos.
2
@New World Everything is infinitely overdetermined. There is chaos.
22
"Everything is predetermined."
A bald assertion is not an argument.
"There is no chaos."
That's not an argument -- you simply repeated your thesis in different words.
Any theory of determinism needs to account for radioactive decay and, more generally, quantum mechanics, which is fundamentally probabilistic in its predictions.
25
If @New World had bothered to read the essay, rather than just react to it with neither knowledge or thought, he would have realized that chaos (meaning "sensitive dependence on initial conditions") is completely consistent with predetermination.
Indeed, Mitch's contributions were in the field of deterministic chaos.
16
I recall a great discussion of Dr. Feigenbaum's theories over Brews With a few Materials Scientists and Physicists as a Senior at U of Florida in 1988. We most of us were assisting the PhD's and our professors in various analysis. During that time at Florida, we also had to do a Senior Thesis. It was basically a discussion about an abstract that 1. We did not quite understand, 2. The ideas made sense, And on a personal note 3. There where a couple of women in the group, one that I was beyond attracted to- she was finishing up her degree in Veterinary Medicine and I thought she was a genius.
8
Scientists or anyone really who develop or perceive truly new insights into how the world works are very rare.
He clearly helped advance a fundamental insight regarding chaos, i.e. that within the apparent randomness of chaotic systems, there are underlying patterns.
Most of us follow a template some original genius or very bright person developed, even as we sometimes add in a new way to human knowledge.
Those who actually develop an original template are the rare exceptions.
Glad he followed his natural interests and intuitions. I really like and respect this kind of person.
30