Floris Takens

Floris Takens (November 12, 1940 – June 20, 2010)[1] was a Dutch mathematician known for contributions to the theory of chaotic dynamical systems.

Floris Takens
Born(1940-11-12)November 12, 1940
Zaandam, Netherlands
DiedJune 20, 2010(2010-06-20) (aged 69)
NationalityDutch
Alma materUniversity of Amsterdam
Known forTakens's theorem
Scientific career
FieldsMathematics
Doctoral advisorNicolaas Kuiper

Together with David Ruelle, he predicted that fluid turbulence could develop through a strange attractor, a term they coined, as opposed to the then-prevailing theory of accretion of modes. The prediction was later confirmed by experiment. Takens also established the result now known as the Takens's theorem, which shows how to reconstruct a dynamical system from an observed time-series.

Takens was born in Zaandam in the Netherlands. He attended schools in The Hague and in Zaandam before serving in the Dutch army for one year (1960–1961). At the University of Amsterdam he concluded his undergraduate and graduate studies. He was granted a doctorate in mathematics in 1969 under the supervision of Nicolaas Kuiper for a thesis entitled The minimal number of critical points of a function on a compact manifold and the Lusternik–Schnirelmann category.

After his graduate work, Takens spent a year at the Institut des Hautes Études Scientifiques, in Bures-sur-Yvette, near Paris, where he worked with David Ruelle, René Thom, and Jacob Palis. His friendship with Palis has taken him many times to the Instituto de Matemática Pura e Aplicada (IMPA) in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Their collaboration produced several joint publications.

Takens was a professor at the University of Groningen, in Groningen, the Netherlands from 1972 until he retired from teaching in 1999.[2]

Takens was member of:

Selected publications
  • Ruelle, David; Takens, Floris (1971). "On the nature of turbulence". Communications in Mathematical Physics. 20 (3): 167–192. doi:10.1007/BF01646553.
  • Takens, Floris (1981). "Detecting strange attractors in turbulence". Lecture Notes in Mathematics. pp. 366–381.
  • Newhouse, Sheldon E.; Palis, Jacob Jr.; Takens, Floris (1983). "Bifurcations and stability of families of diffeomorphisms". Publications Mathématiques de l'IHÉS. 57: 1–71.

See also

Notes
  1. rug.nl Archived 2010-12-11 at the Wayback Machine (retrieved 30 October 2010)
  2. dynamicalsystems.org (retrieved 30 October 2010)
  3. "Floris Takens (1940–2010)". Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences. Retrieved 17 July 2015.

References
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