J. Doyne Farmer

James Doyne Farmer, Jr. ( born June 22, 1952 in Houston, Texas) is an American physicist who deals with chaos theory and physics of complex systems.

Farmer grew up in Silver City, New Mexico, where he studied physics at the University of Idaho (1969 /70), at Stanford University ( BA 1973) and the University of California, Santa Cruz, where he received his doctorate in 1981. In Santa Cruz, it was made ​​with some fellow students like Norman Packard part of a group of students, the pioneering work in chaos theory. After graduating, he joined the group in 1981 for non-linear dynamics at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in 1983 to 1986 Oppenheimer Fellow and then as a permanent member of the laboratory. In 1988 he was the group for the theory of complex systems.

In 1991 he went into private business and started with Norman Packard and Jim McGill, the company " Prediction company" to apply the chaos theory in the equities and derivatives trading, especially for automated trading processes. Until 1999, he was there chief scientist and 1995-1999 Co-President. The company was later sold to UBS.

He is since 1999 professor at the Santa Fe Institute and also at the Atalaya Institute in Santa Fe, which he founded with. 2007 to 2009 he was associate professor at the LUISS Guido Carli in Rome.

In the early 1980s he became known for work on the Dimension of Strange Attractors from time series analysis and similar works of chaos physics. Later, he also dealt with applications in biology and biochemistry.

As a student he was in the late 1970s ( 1976-1981 ) involved with his fellow student Norman Packard, Robert Shaw and others to develop based on physical principles achieved by a small portable computer probable forecast the movement of the roulette ball roulette systems that they tested also in Las Vegas. It also appeared a book by Thomas Bass. Technical problems prevented at that time, however, by his own admission an implementation on a larger scale.