An Aberdeen academic has been honoured by a prestigious American scientific society for his work in the area of Physics.
Research paper Controlling Chaos
co-authored by Professor Celso Grebogi, Sixth Century Chair in Nonlinear and
Complex Systems at the University
of Aberdeen, has been
selected by the American Physical Society as one of the milestone pieces of research
from the last 50 years.
Professor Grebogi appears alongside
numerous Nobel Prize winners in the list of research papers which has been created by the society
to celebrate the 50 year anniversary of its publication Physical Review Letters.
The list recognises papers that
have made long-lived contributions to physics, either by announcing significant
discoveries, or by initiating new areas of research.
Professor Grebogi co-authored the
paper, which challenged the long standing scientific belief that chaos was
uncontrollable, with Professor Edward Ott and Professor James A.Yorke from the
University of Maryland.
Professor Grebogi said: "To have
our paper chosen by the American Physical Society as a milestone in the last
fifty years is a great honour, especially because more than a third of the
papers in the list have led to Nobel Prizes to their authors.
"Our work opened up a whole new
area of research, changing philosophically our way of thinking about chaos.
Previously to our work, it was strongly believed by scientists that chaos was
intrinsically uncontrollable. We showed in this paper that chaos not only can
be controlled and manipulated but that chaos gives a great inherent flexibility
in choosing a large number of controllable states by applying tiny
perturbations to the system under consideration."
The full list of papers chosen by
the American Physical Society's as milestones can be viewed at http://prl.aps.org/50years/milestones