Mitchell Feigenbaum

Born in New York City in 1944, mathematical physicist Mitchell Feigenbaum is a pioneer in chaos theory. He attended the City College of New York and MIT, where he earned his PhD. In 1975, when he was a staff physicist at Los Alamos National Lab, Feigenbaum used his HP-65 calculator to discover remarkable regularity in seemingly chaotic dynamical systems. As a New York Times article put it, “Of all the possible paths to disorder, nature favors just a few.” Feigenbaum went on to make more discoveries in the field of chaos theory, which has applications in meteorology, computer science, biology, and much more. Feigenbaum has won a MacArthur Fellowship as well as the Wolf Prize in Physics. The prize announcement in 1986 notes that “it is hard to think of any other development in recent theoretical science that has had so broad an impact over so wide a range of fields, spanning both the very pure and the very applied.” (Photo credit: AIP Emilio Segrè Visual Archives, Physics Today Collection)

Date in History: 19 December 1944