Are you an EPFL student looking for a semester project?
Work with us on data science and visualisation projects, and deploy your project as an app on top of GraphSearch.
Concept
George Zaslavsky
Summary
George M. Zaslavsky (Cyrillic: Георгий Моисеевич Заславский) (31 May 1935 – 25 November 2008) was a Soviet mathematical physicist and one of the founders of the physics of dynamical chaos.
Zaslavsky was born in Odessa, Ukraine on 31 May 1935. His father was an artillery officer who dragged his cannon in World War II and survived there. Zaslavsky received his education at the University of Odessa and moved to Novosibirsk in 1957 where a golden age of Siberian physics was beginning.
In 1965, Zaslavsky joined the Institute of Nuclear Physics where he became interested in nonlinear problems of accelerator and plasma physics. Roald Sagdeev and Boris Chirikov helped him form an interest in the theory of dynamical chaos. In 1968, Zaslavsky and his colleagues introduced a separatrix map that became one of the major tools in the theoretical study of Hamiltonian chaos. The work "Stochastical instability of nonlinear oscillations" by G. Zaslavsky and B. Chirikov, published in Physics Uspekhi in 1971, was the first review paper to "open the eyes" of many physicists to the power of the dynamical systems theory and modern ergodic theory. It was realized that very complicated behavior is possible in dynamical systems with only a few degrees of freedom. This complexity cannot be adequately described in terms of individual trajectories and requires statistical methods. Typical Hamiltonian systems are not integrable but chaotic, and this chaos is not homogeneous. At the same values of the control parameters, there coexist regions in the phase space with regular and chaotic motion. The results obtained in the 60th were summarized in the book "Statistical Irreversibility in Nonlinear Systems" (Nauka, Moscow, 1970).
The end of the 1960s was a difficult time for Zaslavsky. He was forced to leave the Institute of Nuclear Physics in Novosibirsk for signing letters in defense of some Soviet dissidents. Zaslavsky got a position at the Institute of Physics in Krasnoyarsk, not far away from Novosibirsk.
Official source
About this result
This page is automatically generated and may contain information that is not correct, complete, up-to-date, or relevant to your search query. The same applies to every other page on this website. Please make sure to verify the information with EPFL's official sources.