Mitchell Feigenbaum

Mitchell Feigenbaum
Mitchell Feigenbaum in 2006
Born	(1944-12-19) December 19, 1944 (age 72) New York City, United States
Notable awards	Heineman Prize (2008)

Mitchell Jay Feigenbaum (born December 19, 1944) is a mathematical physicist whose pioneering studies in chaos theory led to the discovery of the Feigenbaum constants.

Feigenbaum was born in New York City, to Polish and Ukrainian Jewish immigrants. He attended Samuel J. Tilden High School, in Brooklyn, New York, and the City College of New York. In 1964 he began his graduate studies at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Enrolling for graduate study in electrical engineering, he changed his area to physics. He completed his doctorate in 1970 for a thesis on dispersion relations, under the supervision of Professor Francis E. Low.

After short positions at Cornell University (1970–1972) and the Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University (1972–1974), he was offered a longer-term post at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico to study turbulence in fluids. Although that group of researchers was ultimately unable to unravel the currently intractable theory of turbulent fluids, his research led him to study chaotic maps.

In 1983, he was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship, and in 1986, he was awarded the Wolf Prize in Physics "for his pioneering theoretical studies demonstrating the universal character of non-linear systems, which has made possible the systematic study of chaos". He is a member of the Board of Scientific Governors at The Scripps Research Institute. He has been Toyota Professor at Rockefeller University since 1986.