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Mitchell Feigenbaum passed away
07-04-2019, 07:31 AM
Post: #1
Mitchell Feigenbaum passed away
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.
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07-05-2019, 03:38 PM
Post: #2
RE: Mitchell Feigenbaum passed away
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! Smile

TomC
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07-05-2019, 04:43 PM
Post: #3
RE: Mitchell Feigenbaum passed away
(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

Aeternitas modo est. Longa non est, paene nil.
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07-05-2019, 05:41 PM (This post was last modified: 07-05-2019 05:42 PM by Felix Gross.)
Post: #4
RE: Mitchell Feigenbaum passed away
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
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07-07-2019, 02:18 AM
Post: #5
RE: Mitchell Feigenbaum passed away
Condolences and comfort to the Feigenbaum family.
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