Floris Takens (born November 12, 1940) is a Dutch mathematician known for contributions to the theory of chaotic dynamical systems.
Together with David Ruelle he predicted that fluid turbulence could develop through a strange attractor, a term they coined, as opposed to the then-prevailing theory of accretion of modes. The prediction was later confirmed by experiment. Takens also established the result now known as the Takens' theorem, which shows how to reconstruct a dynamical system from an observed time-series.
Takens was born in Zaandam in the Netherlands. He attended schools in The Hague and in Zaandam before serving in the Dutch army for one year (1960-1961). At the University of Amsterdam he concluded his undergraduate and graduate studies. He was granted a doctorate in mathematics in 1969 under the supervision on Nicolaas Kuiper for a thesis entitled The minimal number of critical points of a function on a compact manifold and the Lyusternik–Schnirelmann category.
After his graduate work, Takens spent a year at the IHES, in Bures-sur-Yvette, near Paris, where he worked with David Ruelle, René Thom, and Jacob Palis. His friendship with Palis has taken him many times to the Instituto de Matemática Pura e Aplicada, IMPA, in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Their collaboration produced several joint publications.
Takens has been a professor at the University of Groningen, in Groningen, Netherlands since 1972. He retired from teaching in 1999 and is now a professor emeritus.
He is member of:
- The Royal Dutch Academy of Arts and Sciences,
- The Brazilian Academy of Sciences (since 1981), and
- The editorial board for the Springer-Verlag's Lecture Notes in Mathematics.
See also
Selected publications
- D. Ruelle and F. Takens (1971). "On the nature of turbulence". Communications of Mathematical Physics 20: 167-192.
- F. Takens (1981). "Detecting strange attractors in turbulence". Lecture Notes in Mathematics: 366-381.
- F. Takens and J. Palis Jr. (1983). "Bifurcations and stability of families of diffeomorphisms". Publications Mathématiques de l'I.H.E.S. 57: 1-71.
References
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