Mitchell Feigenbaum passed away

[jwdietrich]

On June 30, 2019, Mitchell Feigenbaum, one of the outstanding pioneers of chaos theory, died at the age of 74. In 1975 he discovered with an HP-65 calculator that the ratio of successive distances between bifurcation events tends to a constant value, which was later termed Feigenbaum constant. This was one of the founding events of chaos theory and nonlinear dynamics.

R.I.P.

[TomC]

Dam; I was hoping to find him for a conference presentation.

I too was fidgeting with iterative calculations on my 65 back in 1974.

He took things a bit farther than I did!

TomC

[Jonathan Busby]

(07-04-2019 07:31 AM)jwdietrich Wrote:  On June 30, 2019, Mitchell Feigenbaum, one of the outstanding pioneers of chaos theory, died at the age of 74. In 1975 he discovered with an HP-65 calculator that the ratio of successive distances between bifurcation events tends to a constant value, which was later termed Feigenbaum constant. This was one of the founding events of chaos theory and nonlinear dynamics.

R.I.P.

This is indeed sad :'( . He died so young -- my grandfather recently died and he was almost 100.

I was also sad when Michael Golomb died at 98. He was the person who came up with all Purdue's higher math Problems of the Week. Apparently though, there is still a backlog of problems that have yet to be published as Michael Golomb was so prolific.

R.I.P. to both of them.

Regards,

Jonathan

[Felix Gross]

This is truly sad. I remember discussing him with TomC some HHCs ago.

Discovering a natural constant with an HP 65 is a unique achievement.

He tells the story here in an acessible way

https://permalink.lanl.gov/object/tr?wha...UR-80-5007

RIP Prof Feigenbaum


Felix

[Eddie W. Shore]

Condolences and comfort to the Feigenbaum family.