Robert May, Former UK Chief Scientist and Chaos Theory Pioneer, Dies Aged 84 (theguardian.com) 11
Pioneering Australian scientist Robert May, whose work in biology led to the development of chaos theory, has died at age 84. The Guardian reports: Known as one of Australia's most accomplished scientists, he served as the chief scientific adviser to the United Kingdom, was president of the Royal Society, and was made a lord in 2001. Born in Sydney on January 8, 1938, May's work was influential in biology, zoology, epidemiology, physics and public policy. More recently, he applied scientific principles to economics and modeled the cause of the 2008 global financial crisis. On Wednesday, his friends and colleagues paid tribute to a man who they said was a gifted polymath and a "true giant" among scientists.
Dr Benjamin Pope, an Australian astrophysicist and student at Oxford from 2013 to 2017, said May was a role model, and meeting him was a highlight of his university career. "I became aware of his achievements almost as soon as I learnt anything about physics in university," Pope told Guardian Australia. "My first contact with computer programming was at the University of Sydney, in first year physics, where the example is to recreate Robert May's experiment with the bifurcation diagram and the logistic map. "His bifurcation diagram is one of the iconic diagrams in physics," he said. "[And] he made what was between three or four independent discoveries that lead to chaos theory. You might have heard of the butterfly effect ... May's is probably the other foundational, computational model of chaos."
Dr Benjamin Pope, an Australian astrophysicist and student at Oxford from 2013 to 2017, said May was a role model, and meeting him was a highlight of his university career. "I became aware of his achievements almost as soon as I learnt anything about physics in university," Pope told Guardian Australia. "My first contact with computer programming was at the University of Sydney, in first year physics, where the example is to recreate Robert May's experiment with the bifurcation diagram and the logistic map. "His bifurcation diagram is one of the iconic diagrams in physics," he said. "[And] he made what was between three or four independent discoveries that lead to chaos theory. You might have heard of the butterfly effect ... May's is probably the other foundational, computational model of chaos."
OOH! A May to research! (Score:1)
RIP (Score:3)
Re: (Score:3)
It's a shame that these days, we are focused on hyper-specialization and don't see these sort of polymaths.
Research died out (Score:2)
In the 1990s when I was in mathematics grad school, fractals, dynamical systems and chaos theory were extremely popular. I took various seminars on those topics. You had people generating fractal images on their PCs, and popular science books like Gleick's "Chaos, Making A New Science".
As the decade marched on, it seems that the dynamical systems work didn't have a lot more interesting research left, at least from a mathematical point of view. (Happy to have a specialist contradict me on that). Instead,
Re: Research died out (Score:3)
Maybe from a mathematical perspective, but it's alive and well in the biological and social sciences. I obtained a PhD a few years in a specialized Psychology program that applied non-equilibrium thermodynamics, dynamical systems theory, and complex systems theory in studying psychology and behavior.
J.A. Scott Kelso's work with the HKB model in coordination dynamics was pioneering in this area. Other areas of science tend to lag far behind physics in this regard, and of course, we rely to some extent on mat