Floris Takens, born in Zaanstad, the
Netherlands, earned his PhD in Differential Topology from the
University of Amsterdam in 1969. He spent one year at the Institute
des Hautes Études Scientifiques (IHES) in Bures-sur-Yvette,
France and visited the Instituto Matemática Pura et Applicada
(IMPA) in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil in 1971–72, before becoming
professor of mathematics at the University of Groningen from 1972
until his retirement in the year 1999. He was editor of the Springer
Lecture Notes in Mathematics and member of the Royal Netherlands
Academy of Arts and Sciences (KNAW). In November 2005, he was made a
Ridder in de Orde van de Nederlandse Leeuw (Knight in the Order of the
Dutch Lion) by her Majesty Queen Beatrix of the Netherlands for his
important contributions to the scientific life of the Netherlands and
beyond.
Takens was one of the founding fathers of
dynamical systems theory. For example, the Bogdanov-Takens bifurcation
and the Takens Embedding Theorem bear his name. His time at IHES led
to one of the most famous papers in the field: "On the nature of
turbulence" [Communications in Mathematical Physics 20(3),
1971], which he wrote with David Ruelle. Takens himself felt
that his most important contributions were the book Hyperbolicity
and Sensitive Chaotic Dynamics and Homoclinic Bifurcations
[Cambridge University Press, 1993] that he wrote with Jacob Palis
(IMPA) and his paper "Detecting strange attractors in turbulence" [in
D. A. Rand & L.-S. Young (Eds) Dynamical systems and
turbulence, LNM 898 Springer-Verlag, 1981], which contains the
embedding theorem for time series data.
An interview with
Floris Takens appeared in the January 2006 issue of DSWeb
Magazine
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