Robert Shaw (physicist)

Robert Stetson Shaw ( born July 19, 1946 in Boston, Massachusetts) is an American physicist who deals with chaos theory.

Life and work

Shaw studied at Harvard, but interrupted several times to study, to live in a commune once because of the military service and another time. He belonged to the late 1970s, a group of students at the University of California, Santa Cruz, who pioneered the chaos physics contributed (Norman Packard, J. Doyne Farmer, James Crutchfield ). Incidentally attempted in the late 1970s parts of the group, which also belonged to Shaw to make a prediction based on physical principles roulette system in Las Vegas winnings, what later Thomas Bass in 1985 wrote a book (The Newtonian Casino ). In 1980, he completed his dissertation in Santa Cruz. He wrote in the early 1980s in Santa Cruz at that time influential essays on chaos theory and information theory, in particular the essay Strange Attractors, Chaotic Behavior and Information Flow, which he for the Jacot price in Paris filed in 1978, where he was an honorable mention. The essay was as Preprint late 1970s widespread in circles of theorists of that time forming chaos physics.

After graduation, he conducted research at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, where he worked on the theory of cellular automata with Norman Packard and Stephen Wolfram.

As Gleick in his book "Chaos " 1987 wrote, Shaw was in the 1980s several times on the verge of giving up the physics. In 1988 he was awarded for his work on chaos theory, a MacArthur Fellowship.

2007 Shaw worked as a researcher for the Packard founded by Venetian biotech company Proto Life