Shlomo Havlin

Shlomo Havlin ( born July 21, 1942 in Jerusalem) is an Israeli theoretical physicist.

Havlin studied at Bar- Ilan University (PhD 1972) and the University of Tel Aviv. From 1972 he was a lecturer at Bar- Ilan University, where he became Associate Professor in 1981 and 1984 he was awarded a full professorship. 1984 to 1988 he was Chairman of the Physics Department from 1999 to 2001 and Dean of the Faculty of Exact Sciences. Since 1998 he is Director of the Minerva Center for Mesoscopic, Fractals and Neural Networks.

Havlin dealt with fractals and disordered systems ( and chemical reactions, diffusion and transport in such systems ), random paths, percolation, growth on surfaces, statistical mechanics of polymers, networks and dynamics of complex systems. With applications for example, the stability of the Internet under attack, in cardiology ( where he found, among other signs of multifractality in healthy state) in granular matter in traffic flows, growth of cities and companies, and in climate research. In the eulogy for Lilienfeld Price in particular its contribution to the understanding of the anomalous transport in disordered media, the discovery of long-range correlations in DNA sequences and physiological data ( with development of the DFA method) and the detection of a new universality class for networks highlighted (which in itself absence of a percolation threshold and new critical exponents reflected ) in scale-free networks based on the value of the number of connections parameter.

He examined scale-free networks that occur in nature in many systems ( and in large networks such as the Internet ) and their node- number to a power law ( with exponent usually 2-3 ) follows. They are compared to grids or small-world networks particularly robust against removal of nodes. With Cohen, he showed that these have a much smaller average distance than regular random networks or small-world networks .. Havlin showed by a Renormierungsgruppenanalyse the self-similarity of complex scale-free networks ..

With Armin Bunde and others, he applied the DFA analysis on temperature variations in the atmosphere and thus criticized common global climate models, since they do not reproduce the observed scaling behavior. He also investigated the stochastic and fractal properties of the climate records in ice cores over the last 400,000 years, and other climate data such as Nilhochwässer with collars and other, they found long-term correlations for extreme events.

1996 to 1999 he was President of the Israel Physical Society. In 2009 he received the Chaim Weizmann Prize for Exact Sciences. In 2006 he received the Nicholson Medal of the American Physical Society and the 2010 Julius Edgar Lilienfeld Prize. In 1998 and again in 2002 and 2006 he received the Humboldt Senior Scientist Award. He is a Fellow of the American Physical Society.

Writings

• Same (Editor): Fractals in Science, Springer, 1994, 2nd edition 1995
• Daniel Ben- Avraham: Diffusion and Reactions in Fractals and Disordered Systems, Cambridge University Press 2000, 2nd edition 2005
• Same: diffusion in disordered media, Advances in Physics, Bd.36, 1987, S.695 ( again in Bd.51, 2002, p.187 published)
• With Reuven Cohen: Complex Networks, Structure, Robustness and Function, Cambridge University Press 2009