Feigenbaum Quotes & Sayings

Libchaber's spectrum diagrams showed vividly the precise pattern of period-doubling predicted by the theory. The spikes of new frequencies stand out clearly above the experimental noise. Feigenbaum's scaling theory predicted not only when and where the new frequencies would arrive but also how strong they would be-their amplitudes. — James Gleick

He worked for two months without pause. His functional day was twenty-two hours. He would try to go to sleep in a kind of buzz, and awaken two hours later with his thoughts exactly where he had left them. His diet was strictly coffee. (Even when healthy and at peace, Feigenbaum subsisted exclusively on the reddest possible meat, coffee, and red wine. His friends speculated that he must be getting his vitamins from cigarettes.) In the end, a doctor called it off. He prescribed a modest regimen of Valium and an enforced vacation. But by then Feigenbaum had created a universal theory. — James Gleick

The leap from maps to fluid flow seemed so great that even those most responsible sometimes felt it was like a dream. How nature could tie such complexity to such simplicity was far from obvious. "You have to regard it as a kind of miracle, not like the usual connection between theory and experiment," Jerry Gollub said. Within a few years, the miracle was being repeated again and again in a vast bestiary of laboratory systems: bigger fluid cells with water and mercury, electronic oscillators, lasers, even chemical reactions. Theorists adapted Feigenbaum's techiniques and found other mathematical routes to chaos, cousins of period-doubling: such patterns as intermittency and quasiperiodicity. These, too, proved universal in theory and experiment. — James Gleick

What artists have accomplished is realizing there's only a small amount of stuff that's important and then seeing what it was. — Mitchell Feigenbaum

The driver of the power of intelligent systems is
the knowledge the systems have about
their universe of discourse, Cyc has
not only the world's largest knowledge base,
but the best represented from a technical
point of view. — Edward Feigenbaum