- Kurt Wiesenfeld
Kurt Wiesenfeld is an American
physicist working primarily onnon-linear dynamics . His works primarily concernstochastic resonance , spontaneous synchronization of coupled oscillators, and non-linearlaser dynamics. Since 1987, he has been professor of physics at theGeorgia Institute of Technology .Life and work
Kurt Wiesenfeld received his Bachelor of Science in Physics from the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1979, after which he moved toUniversity of California, Berkeley and received doctorate in 1985. From 1984 to 1985 he was a Lecturer and Research Scientist at theUniversity of California at Santa Cruz .In 1987, as a post-doctoral research scientist in the Solid State Theory Group of
Brookhaven National Laboratory , he and another fellow post-doctoral scientist,Chao Tang , along with their mentor,Per Bak , presented new ideas in group organization with a concept they coinedself-organized criticality in their paper in "Physical Review Letters ." The first discovered example of a dynamical system displaying such self-organized criticality was named after them as the Bak-Tang-Wiesenfeld "sandpile" model.Wiesenfeld is currently a fellow of the
American Physical Society , a member of the Executive Committee of the American Physical Society's Division of Biological Physics, and a member of theSociety for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM).Selected publications
“Oscillatory Dynamics of a Nonlinear Amplifier in the High-Gain Regime: Exploiting a Global Connection”, K. Wiesenfeld, A. R. Bulsara, and M. E. Inchiosa, Phys. Rev. B 62, R9232-35 (2000).
K. Wiesenfeld and F. Moss, "Stochastic resonance and the benefits of noise: from ice ages to crayfish and SQUIDs", Nature 373, 33-36 (1995).
K. Wiesenfeld, P. Colet and S. Strogatz, "Frequency locking in n Josephson arrays: connection with the Kuramoto model", Phys. Rev. E 57, 1563-1569 (1998).
References
* [http://www.physics.gatech.edu/people/faculty/kwiesenfeld.html Georgia Institute of Technology School of Physics]
External links
* [http://gtalumni.org/news/ttopics/win96/wiesen.html "Making the Grade"---an article published in Newsweek by Wiesenfeld]
* [http://prola.aps.org/abstract/PRL/v59/i4/p381_1 Self-organized criticality: An explanation of the 1/f noise]
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