Cvitanović Predrag

Corresponding members II. Department of Mathematical, Physical and Chemical Sciences
Cvitanović Predrag

Date of birth:

  • 1939

Place of birth:

  • Zagreb

Emails:

Cvitanović Predrag

Corresponding members II. Department of Mathematical, Physical and Chemical Sciences

Academic titles:

  • Doctor of Science

Membership in the Academy:

  • corresponding member – Department of Mathematical, Physical and Chemical Sciences (5/12/1994 – …)

Curriculum Vitae

Predrag Cvitanović, a Croatian physicist, was born in Zagreb in 1946, where he graduated from elementary and secondary school. He studied physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and received his Doctorate from Cornell University and then worked at several world science centers such as Stanford University and the Institute for Advanced Study Institute and NATO Advanced Research Workshop in Copenhagen.

He was a professor at the Niels Bohr Institute in Copenhagen, Northwestern University in Chicago, Georgia Technology in Atlanta and Rockefeller University in New York. He was director of the Center for Chaos and Turbulence Studies of the Niels Bohr Institute in Copenhagen  in Copenhagen (1993-1998).

With Japanese physicist Toichiro Kinoshita, he calculated the correction of the sixth order of the magnetic moment of the electron.  He presented a new construction of Lie algebras and the theory of Lie groups of negative dimension. As one of the pioneers of chaos theory, with the American physicist Mitchell Feigenbaum, he introduced a universal equation that describes transitions to turbulence. He introduced a name (pruning front) that describes chaotic (foreign) atractors. He elaborated the theory of development by periodic orbits (cycle expansions) in quantum manifestations of chaos.

He was the editor (1985–90) of cambridge university nonlinear science series, and since 1990 editor-in-chief of physics journal Nonlinearity.

He is a member of the Royal Danish Academy of Sciences and Arts. He was elected as a correspondent member of the Croatian academy of Sciences and Arts in 1994.