Robert Shaw (physicist)

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Robert Stetson Shaw (born July 19, 1946 in Boston , Massachusetts ) is an American physicist who deals with chaos theory.

Life

Shaw initially studied at Harvard University , but interrupted his studies several times, once because of military service and another time to live in a commune. He was part of a group of students at the University of California, Santa Cruz who pioneered chaos physics in the late 1970s ( Norman Packard , J. Doyne Farmer , James Crutchfield). In addition, in the late 1970s, parts of the group, including Shaw, 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). In 1980 he completed his dissertation in Santa Cruz. In the early 1980s in Santa Cruz, he wrote influential essays on chaos theory and information theory, in particular the essay Strange Attractors, Chaotic Behavior and Information Flow , which he submitted for the 1978 Jacot Prize in Paris, where it received an honorable mention. The article was widely used as a preprint at the end of the 1970s in circles of theorists of the then developing chaos physics.

After receiving his doctorate, he did research at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton , where he worked on the theory of cellular automata with Norman Packard and Stephen Wolfram .

As Gleick wrote in his book “Chaos” in 1987, Shaw was close to giving up physics several times in the 1980s. In 1988 he received a MacArthur Fellowship for his work on chaos theory .

In 2007, Shaw worked as a researcher for the Venetian biotech company ProtoLife, founded by Packard

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)
  • Shaw The dripping faucet as a model of chaotic systems . Aerial, Santa Cruz 1984

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Robert Stetson Shaw: Strange Attractors, Chaotic Behavior and Information Flow. In: Journal of Nature Research A . 36, 1981, pp. 80-112 ( PDF , free full text).
  2. ↑ Gleick “Chaos”, Knaur p. 360
  3. ↑ Geometry-induced asymmetric diffusion (Robert S. Shaw, Norman Packard, Matthias Schröter, Harry L. Swinney) Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS June 5, 2007 vol. 104 no. 23 9580-9584)
personal data
SURNAME Shaw, Robert
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Shaw, Robert Stetson (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American physicist
DATE OF BIRTH July 19, 1946
PLACE OF BIRTH Boston , Massachusetts