Joseph Matheny in conversation with old friend and mentor Ralph Abraham.
RALPH H. ABRAHAM has been Professor of Mathematics at the University of California at Santa Cruz since 1968.
He received the Ph.D. in Mathematics at the University of Michigan in 1960, and taught at Berkeley, Columbia, and Princeton before moving to Santa Cruz. He has held visiting positions in Amsterdam, Paris, Warwick, Barcelona, Basel, and Florence, and is the author of more than 20 texts, including eight books currently in print.
He has been active on the research frontier of dynamics — in mathematics since 1960, and in applications and experiments since 1973. He has been a consultant on chaos theory and its applications in numerous fields (medical physiology, ecology, mathematical economics, psychotherapy, etc.) and is an active editor for the technical journals World Futures, and the International Journal of Bifurcations and Chaos.
In 1975, he founded the Visual Mathematics Project at the University of California at Santa Cruz, which became the Visual Math Institute in 1990, with its popular World Wide Web site since early 1994. He has performed works of visual and aural mathematics and music (with Ami Radunskaya and Peter Broadwell) since 1992.
- Mathematician and chaos theorist since 1958,
- Professor of mathematics at UC Santa Cruz since 1968,
- Formerly professor at UC Berkeley, Columbia, and Princeton,
- Founding director of the Visual Math Institute in Santa Cruz, Calif.,
- Author of math texts, including Foundations of Mechanics with Jerrold Marsden and Dynamics, the Geometry of Behavior with Christopher Shaw,
- Author of philosophical books including Chaos, Gaia, Eros and Chaos, Cosmos, and Creativity with Rupert Sheldrake and Terence McKenna,
- Designed the curriculum for the Ross School, grades 5-12, with cultural historian William Irwin Thompson
- Lectures and leads seminars worldwide on chaos theory.
Joseph Matheny 