Theo Geisel (physicist)

Theo Geisel ( born August 24, 1948 in Limburg an der Lahn) is a German theoretical physicist.

Life and career

Hostage studied physics at the Goethe University in Frankfurt am Main and the University of Regensburg, where he received his doctorate in 1975. He then 1976-77 at the Max Planck Institute for Solid State Research in Stuttgart and 1978/79 at Xerox PARC Research Center in Palo Alto. In 1982 he habilitated. 1988/89, he was professor of theoretical physics at the University of Würzburg and from 1989 at the University of Frankfurt, before he became professor at the University of Göttingen in 1996. He is also Director at the Max Planck Institute for Dynamics and Self-Organization (the former Max Planck Institute for Fluid Dynamics ) and coordinator of the Bernstein Center for Computational Neuroscience Göttingen ( Göttingen BCCN ), which he heads since its inception in 2005.

Hostage is married and has two children. He plays flute and saxophone in both the classical and jazz environment.

Research Interests

Hostage deals with problems of nonlinear dynamics and quantum chaos, with applications for example on transport in semiconductor nanostructures and in the dynamics of neural networks, such as neuronal synchronization and pattern formation in the visual cortex. Since 2005, he studied in collaboration with Dirk Brockmann and the spread of infection by human travel activity ( such as the distribution of bills ) by generalizations of random walks ( random walks ), the Lévy processes ( Lévy walks, Lévy Flights), can be written are.

Prizes and awards

He was from 1983 to 1987 Heisenberg Fellow and received the 1994 Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Prize of the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft. In 2008 he became a Fellow of the American Physical Society. In 2009 he received the German - French Gentner - Kastler prize. Hostage is in the editorial board of the journal Physical Review Letters expert on the subject area biophysics.