Norman Packard

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Norman Harry Packard (* 1954 in Billings , Montana ) is an American physicist who deals with chaos theory , the theory of cellular automata and the physics of complex systems.

Norman Packard

Packard grew up in Silver City, New Mexico, and studied at Reed College in Portland, Oregon and the University of California, Santa Cruz , where he was part of a group of students who pioneered chaos physics in the late 1970s ( Robert Shaw , J. Doyne Farmer , James Crutchfield ). In 1982 he received his doctorate in Santa Cruz with the work Measurements of chaos in the presence of noise . In addition, in the late 1970s, parts of the group, including Packard, tried to make a profit with a roulette system based on physical predictive principles in Las Vegas, about which Thomas Bass later wrote a book in 1985 (The Newtonian Casino).

As a post-doc he was at IHES near Paris in 1982 and then at the Institute for Advanced Study , where he worked on the theory of cellular automata with Robert Shaw and Stephen Wolfram .

In the 1990s, he founded "The Prediction Company" with Farmer and others, which applied knowledge of chaos theory to the financial industry. He was temporarily president of the company that was later sold to UBS .

Packard is also CEO of a start-up "Proto-Life", which he founded with his former fellow student Mark Bedau, a philosophy professor, in Venice, and which is supposed to manufacture artificial cells.

literature

  • James Gleick: Chaos. Making a new science. Penguin 1987
  • Thomas Bass: The Newtonian Casino, Penguin 1991 (published in the US as: The Eudaemonic Pie, Houghton Mifflin 1985)
  • Thomas Bass: The Predictors. How a band of maverick physicists used chaos to trade their way to a fortune at Wall Street, Penguin 2001
  • James P. Crutchfield, J. Doyne Farmer, Norman H. Packard, Robert S. Shaw: Chaos , Scientific American, December 1986
  • Crutchfield, Farmer, Packard, Shaw: Geometry from a time series , Physical Review Letters Vol. 47, 1980, p. 712
  • Steen Rasmussen, Mark A. Bedau, Liaohai Chen, David Deamer, David C. Krakauer, Norman H. Packard, Peter F. Stadler (editors): Protocell bridging nonliving and living matter, MIT Press 2008
  • Packard et al. a. (Editor): Artificial Life VII, MIT Press 2000

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Norman Packard in the Mathematics Genealogy Project (English) Template: MathGenealogyProject / Maintenance / id used.
personal data
SURNAME Packard, Norman
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Packard, Norman Harry (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American physicist
DATE OF BIRTH 1954
PLACE OF BIRTH Billings , Montana