The Great Ideas Today 1986

Leo Kadanoff is a theoretical physicist who has contributed widely to research in the properties of matter and upon the fringes of elementary particle physics, Most recently he has been involved in the understanding of the onset of chaos in simple mechanical and fluid systems. He was born and received his early education in New York City. He did his undergraduate and graduate work at Harvard University, and after some post-doctoral work at the Niels Bohr Institute in Copenhagen he joined the staff at the University of Illinois in 1962. In 1966 and 1967 he did research on the organization of matter in " phase transitions, " which led to a substantial modification of physicists' ways of looking at these changes in the state of matter. For this work he received the Buckley Prize of the American