Arthur Winfree

Arthur Taylor Winfree ( born May 15, 1942 in Saint Petersburg, Florida; † 5 November 2002 in Tucson, Arizona) was an American theoretical biologist.

Life

Winfree participated as a student in the final of the Westinghouse Science Talent competition. He studied first as a physics engineer at Cornell University ( Bachelor's degree 1965) and then biology at Princeton University, where he received his doctorate in 1970. From 1969 he was assistant professor at the University of Chicago, 1972 Associate Professor of Biology at Purdue University, where in 1979 he was professor. From 1986 he was professor of ecology and evolutionary biology at the University of Arizona, from 1989 as a " Regents Professor ".

In 1982 he was Guggenheim Fellow and from 1984 MacArthur Fellow. 2000 he received the Norbert Wiener Prize. In 1989 he received the Dutch Einthoven Award for his cardiac work.

His son Erik Winfree is a professor at Caltech ( specializing in biological information processing ) and his daughter, Rachel, a professor of entomology at Rutgers University.

Work

Winfree is known for his theory of nonlinear coupled oscillators in biology, the theory of biological rhythms and clocks ( from the synchronization of the grill chirp up to cardiac arrhythmias such as ventricular fibrillation ), a field that he certain essential.

In 1965 he studied in his thesis at Cornell University, the theory of large quantities of weakly coupled nonlinear oscillators, the influence due to the weak coupling to a first approximation only through their phases. He showed phase transitions to collective behavior (synchronization of the oscillators ).

In the late 1960s he studied in his dissertation ( " circadian " ) rhythms in populations of fruit flies. His then surprising discovery was that such rhythms can bring even by weak disturbances if they are made with the correct phase of the clock ( occurrence of a phase singularity ).

He also dealt with further self-organization and pattern formation phenomena in chemistry ( Belousov -Zhabotinsky reaction) and similar reaction-diffusion equations, which he examined from the early 1970s, where he studied both theoretically and experimentally two-dimensional spiral waves, and later three-dimensional worm (Scroll) waves. In biology, he examined, for example, the self-organization in slime mold colonies. He often was guided by "simple" topological considerations as for his work on biological rhythms.

Writings

• Sudden death cardiatic - a problem in topology, Scientific American, May 1983
• Geometry of Biological Time, Springer 1980, 2nd edition 2001
• When time breaks down: the three dimensional Dynamics of Electrochemical Waves and Cardiac arrythmias, Princeton University Press 1987
• Biological clocks - time structures of the living spectrum Publisher 1988 ( English original: timing of biological clocks, Scientific American Library, Freeman, 1987)