9 ms·
Mitchell Feigenbaum (1944–2019), 4.66920160910299067185320382…
- ISL 7y agoMitchell Feigenbaum has, for the last ~17 years, been my vote for the next Nobel Laureate in Physics. It is a rare thing to derive an irrational fundamental mathematical constant that appears in nature. The Feigenbaum constants are as fundamental as e and \pi, and they are readily observed experimentally (though, necessarily, not to full precision :) ). Godspeed, Dr. Feigenbaum. Thank you.
- ars 7y ago> Nobel Laureate in Physics They only give Nobels to living people, and typically only young people. Maybe there is some other award recognition?
- hjalle 7y agoYoung people? They only give to living people but my impression is not that most laureates are young Edit: 72 years in average across all prizes, although first half of 20th century was lower. https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-37578899 https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-37578899
- ars 7y agoI guess I'm wrong, but I read that they try to give it to people just starting out in their field, to encourage them to continue, rather than as a prize for finishing.
- CydeWeys 7y agoIf that's the intent then they've been failing miserably at it.
- ezequiel-garzon 7y agoYou may be thinking of the Fields Medal in mathematics, for which recipients must be under 40.
- ISL 7y agoThat was Nobel's original intent, but the reality of the prize has changed with time. The Fields Medal and the MacArthur Genius awards are very much in that spirit.
- segfaultbuserr 7y agoYou must have confused it with a different prize. Update: user "ISL" says "that was Nobel's original intent, but the reality of the prize has changed with time." Yes, Nobel Prize is only given by living people to encourage innovation rather than remembering the death, yes. However, it's very common for the Nobel Prize to aware scientists after a discovery has been made. Nobel Prize of Literature is the same, I believe. For example, Albert Einstein won the Nobel Prize in 1921 for "for his services to theoretical physics, and especially for his discovery of the law of the photoelectric effect", but Einstein's relevant papers were published in 1905 on Annalen der Physik, it's 16 years later after the discovery. Another recent example is the Nobel Prize of Physics of 2014, given to Isamu Akasaki, Hiroshi Amano, and Shuji Nakamura for blue LEDs, it's also 20 years later. Due to this very reason, The Breakthrough Prize was established in 2012 by multiple entrepreneurs, including Mark Zuckerberg, as a prize, which its proponents claim to be that they try to give it to people just starting out in their field, to encourage them to continue, rather than as a prize for finishing. Although it has received some criticisms of being a rockstar award as well. Is it, by any chance, the prize you were thinking about? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breakthrough_Prize https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breakthrough_Prize https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breakthrough_Prize_in_Fundamental_Physics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breakthrough_Prize_in_Fundamen...
- voxl 7y agoAre you thinking of the Fields Medal in math?
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- JackFr 7y ago> The Feigenbaum constants are as fundamental as e and \pi I suppose its debatable how fundamental a constant is , but there is no way the Feigenbaum constant is even in the same neighborhood as \pi and e.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- WhitneyLand 7y agoYes, it's kind of hard to get more fundamental than waves and circles. Although, as I was just about to say what math could you do without them on second thought, the answer seems to be quite a lot. For example I couldn't say without researching it but how much did Gödel or Turing rely on them, at least for their most influential work? That question will probably come back to bite hard given their footprints. Another conjecture, most software developers will never have to use them extensively. Yes gaming, computer graphics, and I guess all signal processing would become suddenly more challenging but corporate IT and devops ought to be pretty safe. Maybe it depends on a personal definition of fundamental. I think you could make an argument that Newton's results were more fundamental than Einstein's, however staggeringly less complete they might seem hundreds of years in the future.
- ISL 7y agoAgreed -- I used the word "fundamental" to suggest that it emerges from pure mathematics. In that sense, Feigenbaum's constants are in the same class as \pi and e, which is distinct from the traditional "fundamental constants" of physics like c, \hbar, fundamental charge, etcetera. The fundamental constants of physics have, as yet, no known mathematical origin. Feigenbaum's constants, on the other hand, emerge from pure mathematics and also appear in nature. That they are expected to be irrational, like \pi and e, only adds to the charm.
- jordigh 7y agoDo we know the constant is irrational? I'd be surprised if we did.
- chime 7y agoI know this isn’t written as a typical obituary but I can’t imagine a better way to say goodbye and thank you a true scientist. The entire blog post is beautiful- not just the presentation but also the content and sentiment.
- quakeguy 7y agoI agree absolutely.
- kevin_thibedeau 7y agoSave for the bits where it focuses on Wolfram's jilted ego.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- ngvrnd 7y agoThe HP-65 was pretty swank.
- 0xdeadbeefbabe 7y agoEspecially if you have it with you.
- aeorgnoieang 7y agoI'd hope so! It's $795 MSRP in 1974 'is' roughly $4,100 in 2019.
- pseudolus 7y agoIncredible and insightful overview about the life of a man whose contributions to science were unknown to me until today. Thank you for posting.
- ars 7y agoHere's a Numberphile on it if you want to understand the constant: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ETrYE4MdoLQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ETrYE4MdoLQ As a nice bonus that video will also help you understand the Mandelbrot and Julia sets.
- onychomys 7y agoOne interesting place that period doubling shows up that the article doesn't mention is in population ecology. I'm most familiar with the Tribolium work of Constantino, Dennis, Cushing, and some other folks, which you can read an example of here[0]. Basically, the beetles have three life stages (four, actually - egg, larva, pupa, adult - but adding eggs in the model doesn't increase accuracy any so they leave it out for simplicity), and if you model the respective numbers of adults for a starting number of larvae, you can see truly chaotic behavior, including period doubling. It's fascinating work. [0] https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1046/j.1461-0248.2001.00223.x https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1046/j.1461-0248...
- aeorgnoieang 7y agoThere were several references to fish populations and and even "population biology". I wouldn't have thought 'population ecology' was that different but a cursory Google search leads me to believe I was wrong. That's a neat connection!
- j7ake 7y agoI really love these Wolfram biographies of famous people.
- vtail 7y agoYou might enjoy his "Idea Makers: Personal Perspectives on the Lives & Ideas of Some Notable People", which consists of short essays on a few interesting people, some of which he knew personally.
- scarejunba 7y agoChaos : Making a New Science by James Gleick https://www.amazon.com/dp/B003YL4KOO/ https://www.amazon.com/dp/B003YL4KOO/ contextualizes the period-doubling thing and talks about some of the other related stuff. Good book.
- madhadron 7y agoFeigenbaum barely ever showed up in the physics building at Rockefeller while I was there. He had an office. I saw his retreating back once, but he chose not to engage with the community there, despite it being full of people who wandered as widely as he did.
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- simonebrunozzi 7y agoI am very ignorant, but here's a question: are Feigenbaum's discoveries related at all to Langton's ant [0]? [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Langton%27s_ant https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Langton%27s_ant
- peapicker 7y agoI was an undergrad CS intern (and Chaos enthusiast) assisting the physicists at Los Alamos Natl. Labs Center for Nonlinear Studies when he visited to give the monthly “Tea Talk” on some subject in nonlinear mathematics/ chaos theory back in ‘88. I didn’t understand most of what he said. I asked the Deputy Director, a long-time PhD Theoretical Physicist, about the gist of the talk afterwards. He said “I didn’t understand most of what he said. Maybe if I had been collaborating with him for a few months...” Feigenbaum was a fascinating man and some of his writing is what made me want to get an internship at the Center. I never dreamed I meet the man over tea. A great man.
- gwf 7y agoI was there as well, also as an intern. Around the same time, Mandelbrot also stopped by CNLS to give a talk. CNLS in the late 80s was truly a magical place.
- peapicker 7y agoIt was pretty amazing. I recall Doyne Farmer was there too - he had this crazy custom coprocessor card for his cellular automata explorations. I got to write some stuff to run on a CRAY Y-MP. Got to to play with NeXT black box serial no. 36. (LANL had the first 50 I think). Lots of crazy cool people and tech!
- ovi256 7y agoI'm amazed by the observation that even the Deputy Director, a seasoned theoretician, did not expect to understand a peer researcher's work without several months of collaboration. What chance does a mere undergrad or practitioner stand ! :)
- pas 7y agoBasically the same :) Usually, after a certain level math problems become very narrow, and a small subfield develops around them. They are "easy" to get into, to catch up, read the important papers, sketch out the proofs for yourself, get a feel for the concepts and for the conjectures that lurk among them. And usually that's it. Usually a few folks of that very particular topic/field have some ideas that they are working on, usually for at least a year, they try to formalize them, conceptualize them, communicate them, and naturally to prove them. And sometimes draft/working papers are all we get. Sometimes someone becomes a "household" name after many persistent years like Wiles.
- anbop 7y agoI normally find Stephen Wolfram insufferable (and he still is, in this article) but boy what a privilege it is to have a friend who will eulogize us like this. If I was an intellectual associate of Wolfram’s I’d ask him to write this article for me to read before I died.
- miobrien 7y agoCan someone elaborate as to why Wolfram’s insufferable? I’ve only looked at his blog once or twice. However this post was great.
- wglb 7y agoHere is one opinion: http://bactra.org/reviews/wolfram/ http://bactra.org/reviews/wolfram/: A Rare Blend of Monster Raving Egomania and Utter Batshit Insanity
- akira2501 7y ago> Can someone elaborate as to why Wolfram’s insufferable? My own belief, based on work I did in the 1980s, is that it’s actually an intrinsic youthful genius phenomenon—analogous to the insufferability one sees in my rule 34 cellular automaton.
- apricot 7y agoThis guy Wolframs.
- segfaultbuserr 7y agoIt's official, a clone of Stephen Wolfram has been identified...
- tempodox 7y agoIt might just be a Markov chain “AI”.
- munificent 7y agoI first saw that beautiful bifurcation diagram as a teenager in this book called "Fractals" that showed a bunch of fractals as well as programs to draw them. I was amazed that such simple arithmetic could lead to such weird, organic results. The code to draw it is astonishingly simple. Here's an implementation in Dart that prints it to your console: import 'dart:math' as math; const min = 2.4; const max = 4.0; const width = 120; const height = 100; main() { for (var r = min; r < max; r += (max - min) / height ) { var x = 0.5; var counts = [for (var i = 0; i < width; i++) 0]; var greatest = 0; for (var i = 0; i < 200; i++) { x = r * x * (1 - x); var i = (x * width).toInt(); counts[i]++; greatest = math.max(greatest, counts[i]); } print(counts.map((n) => n > greatest / 10 ? "*" : " ").join("")); } }
- jonahx 7y agoTranslated into J: w=. 120 row=. [: (' *' {~ ] > 10 %~ >./) [: (1 #. i.@w =/ ]) [: <. w * (* ] * -.@])^:(<200)&0.5 echo (row"0) 2.4 + 1.6r100 * i.101 Live: https://tio.run/##HYzBCoJAFEX3fsWhKGcmer4n1UJU/I@YNhFkG8GNi8BfnyZ3l3MO95PS0glWazFP/3VvcCWh5LsS6THlsNJL5Tdl7IVRhoWuIm6sFRYCLuQ@cJYh@kfj2lrVH1Wuxev5nnD5faeeWi6cMLnNpprzUUwtpR8 https://tio.run/##HYzBCoJAFEX3fsWhKGcmer4n1UJU/I@YNhFkG8GNi8...
- lonelappde 7y ago"Chaos and Fractals", a huge tome of a book , from the 1990s, is an incredible book to learn about Feigenbaum's work and others. The programming language it uses is rather obsolete, but it's such a wonderful book for a motivated high school or college student.
- kenver 7y agoAny chance you know the author? There's a few with similar titles.
- tobinfricke 7y agoHeinz-Otto Peitgen
- jl6 7y agoDoes Wolfram record and index all his voicemails?
- dchest 7y agoHe records everything he can record :) https://blog.stephenwolfram.com/2012/03/the-personal-analytics-of-my-life/ https://blog.stephenwolfram.com/2012/03/the-personal-analyti...
- milemi 7y agoA completely frivolous and useless note: the photo at the bottom of the article was taken at a table in the restaurant called Mediterraneo on the corner of 2nd and 66th, and behind him is the block on which one of the scenes in Annie Hall was shot.