Life and Work
Ralph Abraham earned his Ph.D. from the University of Michigan in 1960, and held positions at UC Santa Cruz, Berkeley, Columbia, and Princeton. He has also held visiting positions in Amsterdam, Paris, Warwick, Barcelona, Basel, and Florence.
He founded the Visual Math Institute at UC Santa Cruz in 1975, at that time it was called the "Visual Mathematics Project". He is editor of World Futures and for the International Journal of Bifurcations and Chaos. Abraham is a member of cultural historian William Irwin Thompson's Lindisfarne Association.
Abraham has been involved in the research frontier and the development of dynamical systems theory in the 1960s and 1970s. He has been a consultant on chaos theory and its applications in numerous fields, such as medical physiology, ecology, mathematical economics, psychotherapy, etc.
Another interest of Abraham's concerns alternative ways of expressing mathematics, for example visually or aurally. He has staged performances in which mathematics, visual arts and music are combined into one presentation.
Abraham developed an interest in "Hip" activities in Santa Cruz in the 1960s and set up a web site gathering information on the topic (http://www.ralph-abraham.org/1960s/). He is featured in the documentary DMT: the Spirit Molecule, discussing his experiments with psilocybin, LSD and DMT.
Read more about this topic: Ralph Abraham
Famous quotes containing the words life and/or work:
“Our rural village life was a purifying, uplifting influence that fortified us against the later impacts of urbanization; Church and State, because they were separated and friendly, had spiritual and ethical standards that were mutually enriching; freedom and discipline, individualism and collectivity, nature and nurture in their interaction promised an ever stronger democracy. I have no illusions that those simpler, happier days can be resurrected.”
—Agnes E. Meyer (1887–1970)
“The legend of Felix is ended, the toiling of Felix is done;
The Master has paid him his wages, the goal of his journey is won;
He rests, but he never is idle; a thousand years pass like a day,
In the glad surprise of Paradise where work is sweeter than play.”
—Henry Van Dyke (1852–1933)