Peter Grassberger

Peter Grassberger ( born May 17, 1940 in Vienna) is an Austrian physicist who deals with chaos theory and particle physics.

Life

Grassberger attended school in Steyr and studied physics and mathematics in 1959 at the University of Vienna, where he received his doctorate in 1965 at Walter Thirring and Herbert Pietschmann ( with a theme of theoretical particle physics ). As a post - graduate student, he was from 1965 to 1968 at the University of Bonn. 1969 and 1971 he was a professor at Kabul University ( where he dealt among other things with geophysics of sand dunes) and in 1971, he became an assistant at the University of Bonn, where he habilitated in 1973. 1973 to 1975 he was at CERN and 1975-1977 Visiting Professor ( Maitre de Conferences ) at the University of Nice. 1977 to 2005 he was professor at the University of Wuppertal. 1996-2005 he was on leave in Wuppertal and Director of the Research Group for Complex Systems at the John von Neumann Institute of Research Centre Jülich.

He has been a visiting scientist at SLAC, Los Alamos National Laboratory, the James Franck Institute, University of Chicago, the University of Warwick, the Weizmann Institute, the Niels Bohr Institute in Copenhagen, the University of Rome, the Korean Institute for Advanced Study in Seoul the perimeter Institute, the University of Stellenbosch, the University of Utrecht ( Kramers Professor 2005), Florida State University and the Institute for Theoretical Physics, University of California, Santa Barbara. Since 2006, he has a guest research professor at the University of Calgary.

Grassberger dealt first with theoretical particle physics, for example, the exact treatment of the three-body scattering and scattering on bound states ( with Werner Sandhas in Bonn, Alt- Grassberger - Sandhas equations). He also found correlations between the field theory of Regge poles ( Reggeon Field Theory) and stochastic systems, which made him switch to statistical physics.

With Itamar Procaccia 1983, he led the correlation dimension in the chaos theory and the Grassberger - Procaccia algorithm for its calculation. It is used to calculate Fractal dimensions and marking Strangely attractors.

It deals with, among other reaction-diffusion systems, the Ising model, cellular automata, fractals, Self-organized criticality and percolation.

Writings

• With Procaccia Measuring the Strangeness of Strange Attractors, Physica D, Volume 9, 1983, pp. 189-208
• With Procaccia Characterization of strange attractors, Phys. Rev. Lett., Volume 50, 1983, pp. 346-349