James P. Crutchfield

Patrick James Crutchfield (* June 30, 1955 in San Francisco) is an American physicist who deals with chaos theory and complex systems theory.

Life and work

Crutchfield studied mathematics and physics at the University of California, Santa Cruz, where in 1979 he took his bachelor's degree (summa cum laude) and received his doctorate in 1983. In the late 1970s he belonged to a group of graduate students, the pioneering work in the theory of chaos rendered (Robert Shaw ( physicist ), Norman Packard, J. Doyne Farmer ). As a post-doc, he was at the Los Alamos National Laboratory ( where he also later again was a visiting scholar ) and from 1983 at the University of California, Berkeley ( 1985/86 with an IBM scholarship), where he was until 1997 Research Physicist. From 1990 he was External Associate Professor at the Santa Fe Institute and thereafter there until 2004 Research Professor, then external professor. 1995 to 2004 he was also an Adjunct Associate Professor at the University of New Mexico. From 2004 he was professor at the University of California, Davis and director of the Complexity Science Center.

He was also a visiting professor at the Sloan Center for Theoretical Neurobiology, University of California, San Francisco, at the Beckman Institute at the University of Illinois at Urbana -Champaign and Bernard Osher Fellow at the Exploratorium in San Francisco.

Crutchfield employed next to chaos theory, among others, hydrodynamics, pattern formation, theory of phase transitions, solid state physics, astrophysics, evolutionary theory, genetic algorithms.