Ivar Ekeland

Picture of the Julia set
Ivar Ekeland has written popular books about chaos theory and about fractals,[1][2] such as the Julia set (animated). Ekeland's exposition provided mathematical inspiration to Michael Crichton's discussion of chaos in Jurassic Park.[3]

Ivar I. Ekeland (born 2 July 1944, Paris) is a French mathematician of Norwegian descent. Ekeland has written influential monographs and textbooks on nonlinear functional analysis, the calculus of variations, and mathematical economics, as well as popular books on mathematics, which have been published in French, English, and other languages. Ekeland is known as the author of Ekeland's variational principle and for his use of the Shapley–Folkman lemma in optimization theory. He has contributed to the periodic solutions of Hamiltonian systems and particularly to the theory of Kreĭn indices for linear systems (Floquet theory).[4] Ekeland is cited in the credits of Steven Spielberg's 1993 movie Jurassic Park as an inspiration of the fictional chaos theory specialist Ian Malcolm appearing in Michael Crichton's 1990 novel Jurassic Park.[3]

  1. ^ Ekeland (1988, Appendix 2 The Feigenbaum bifurcation, pp. 132–138) describes the chaotic behavior of the iterated logistic function, which exhibits the Feigenbaum bifurcation. A paperback edition was published: Ekeland, Ivar (1990). Mathematics and the unexpected (Paperback ed.). University Of Chicago Press. ISBN 978-0-226-19990-0.
  2. ^ According to Jeremy Gray, writing for Mathematical Reviews (MR945956)
  3. ^ a b Cite error: The named reference Crichton was invoked but never defined (see the help page).
  4. ^ According to D. Pascali, writing for Mathematical Reviews (MR1051888)
    Ekeland, Ivar (1990). Convexity methods in Hamiltonian mechanics. Ergebnisse der Mathematik und ihrer Grenzgebiete (3) [Results in Mathematics and Related Areas (3)]. Vol. 19. Berlin: Springer-Verlag. pp. x+247. ISBN 978-3-540-50613-3. MR 1051888.