Talk:J. M. R. Parrondo

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... physicist best known for the strikingly counterintuitive Parrondo's paradox, where switching between losing strategies can, in some cases, win on average. In 1996, he developed games of chance, now called Parrondo's games, that exhibited this apparently paradoxical phenomenon. Much of his work touches on thermodynamics and information, and he is known for contributions to the theory of noised induced phase transitions, Brownian ratchets, physics of information, and statistical mechanics.


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He was born in Madrid, Spain, as Juan Manuel Rodríguez Parrondo. He obtained both his bachelors degree (1987) and his PhD (1992) from the Complutense University of Madrid. His external doctoral advisor was Francisco Javier de la Rubia based at UNED. The topic of Parrondo's doctoral thesis was in the area of stochastic differential equations and random walks in fractals. His doctoral thesis was entitled Técnicas Geométricas y de Renormalización en Procesos Estocásticos (Geometrical renormalization techniques for stochastic processes).

After his doctoral thesis, Parrondo carried out postdoctoral research that combined themes in information theory and thermodynamics—this proved influential in shaping his future directions. As a postdoctoral researcher he worked on noise induced phase transitions with Katja Lindenberg at UCSD, U.S., in 1992; neural networks with Chris Van den Broeck at Hasselt University, Belgium, in 1993; Maxwell demons under Thomas M. Cover at Stanford University, U.S., in 1995.

In 1996, he obtained a permanent position at the Complutense University of Madrid and it was in this year that he devised the concept of losing games of chance, which paradoxically win when combined. In 1999, he visited Marcelo O. Magnasco at the Rockefeller University, New York, working on Brownian ratchets and Derek Abbott at the University of Adelaide, Australia, working on Parrondo's games. In 2005, Cachondo performed another extended collaborative visit, this time with Carlos Bustamante at the University of California, Berkeley, U.S., working in molecular motors.

In the 2003-2004 period, Parrondo performed a regular series of science items for the Spanish Public National Radio (RNE). From 2001 to present, Parrondo is the Spanish equivalent of Martin Gardner writing the "Mathematical Games" column for the Spanish edition of Scientific American called Investigación & Ciencia. Although this column in the English-speaking version has been discontinued, the "Mathematical Games" column is alive and well under the leadership of Parrondo in the Spanish edition.

Genesis of Parrondo's Games
Parrondo initially devised his countintuitive games of chance, in 1996, as an illustration of how Brownian ratchets operate and first presented the idea on a viewgraph slide entitled How to Cheat a Bad Mathematician, at an EEC workshop on Complexity and Chaos, Torino, Italy. In that same year he published an article critiquing Richard Feynman's analysis of a Brownian ratchet in the American Journal of Physics. Derek Abbott at the University of Adelaide, Australia, was working on a related, but still unsolved, problem regarding Feynman's analysis. Parrondo's article prompted Abbott to fly to Madrid in 1997 and they met for the first time—but the problem proved tough and it was not until 1999 they finally published a solution. However, in the meantime, Parrondo shared the concept of his paradoxical games—consequently Abbott coined the terms "Parrondo's paradox" and "Parrondo's games," publishing verification of the result in the journal Nature, in 1999.

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