User:Gcalda/Itamar Procaccia

Itamar Procaccia (born September 29, 1949 in Tel Aviv) is an Israeli physicist and chemist working in the area of nonlinear dynamics and deterministic chaos theory.

Procaccia studied chemistry at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem with a bachelor's degree in 1973 and got a doctorate in theoretical chemistry in 1976. He also served as an officer in the Israeli army from 1967 to 1970 and 1973/74. From 1977 to 1979 he was a postdoctoral fellow at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. From 1979 he was at the Weizmann Institute, where he became a professor in 1985. From 1989 to 2001 he was dean of the Faculty of Chemistry.

His work focusses on turbulence, fractals and amorphous substances (glass). He has worked with, among others, Leo Kadanoff in Chicago and Predrag Cvitanović in Copenhagen (Nordita). With Peter Grassberger, he introduced the correlation dimension into chaos theory in 1983 introducing the Grassberger-Procaccia algorithm for his calculation. It is used for the calculation of fractal dimensions and the marking of strange attractors.

He has worked as a guest professor at the City University of New York, the IHES, the Nordita, the Isaac Newton Institute, Hong Kong, Rockefeller University, the École Normale Supérieure in Lyon, Brazil, Mexico and several times at the University of Chicago.

He is a fellow of the American Physical Society, the Institute of Physics and a member of the Leopoldina and the Royal Danish Academy of Sciences. In 2009 he received the Israel Prize for Physics. In 2017 he received the EPS Statistical and Nonlinear Physics Prize.