Rufus Bowen

Robert Edward " Rufus " Bowen ( born February 23, 1947 in Vallejo, California, † 30 July 1978 in Santa Rosa, California ) was an American mathematician who worked on graph theory and dynamical systems.

Bowen grew up in Fairfield, and wrote his first mathematical work at age 17. They treated the graph theory, he determined, for example, with a computer all minimal triangulations (minimal triangle graphs ) with up to 14 vertices and all triangulations of the sphere with up to twelve vertices. He studied at the University of California, Berkeley, where he received his doctorate in 1970 with Stephen Smale with the thesis Topological Entropy and Axiom.

In the same year he joined the faculty. In 1974 he was invited speaker at the International Congress of Mathematicians (ICM ) in Vancouver ( Symbolic dynamics for hyperbolic flows). In 1975 he published his book Equilibrium States and the Ergodic Theory of Anosov diffeomorphisms in the Lecture Notes in Mathematics by Springer -Verlag. In 1977 he became a professor at Berkeley, but died a year later with only 31 years of a brain hemorrhage ( as a result of an aneurysm ) on holiday. At the time he was a central figure in his field of work. He wrote pioneering studies on symbolic dynamics, invariant measures, topological entropy and Markov partitions.

In his memory since 1981 find at the University of California, Berkeley every two years instead of Bowen Lectures (donated by an anonymous former student of Bowen ).

His doctoral counts Lai -Sang Young.

Works

• Topological Entropy and Axiom. Dissertation, University of California, Berkeley in 1970.
• Jean -René Chazottes (eds.): Equilibrium States and the Ergodic Theory of Anosov diffeomorphisms. ( Lecture Notes in Mathematics, Volume 470). 2 durchges. Edition. Springer -Verlag, Berlin 2008, ISBN 978-3-540-77605-5.