Chaos and Erodynamics
"Chaos is very much the same as the steady state; it's not scary at all."
with Ralph Abraham
Ralph Abraham is renowned for bringing a fresh perspective to mathematical thought. His study of dynamical systems as the building blocks of reality, has led him to extrapolate fundamental mathematical principles into his philosophical outlook . A professor of Mathematics at the University of California, Santa Cruz, he received his Ph.D. at the University of Michigan in 1960. He taught at UC Berkeley, Columbia and Princeton before moving to Santa Cruz in I 96S and has held visiting positions in such various locations as Amsterdam, Paris, Warwick, Barcelona, Basel, Florence and Siena.
He is the author of numerous mathematical books. Linear and Multi-Linear Algebra, Foundations of Mechanics was written with J.E. Marsden and Transversal Mappings and Flows with J.Robbin. He wrote Manifolds,Tensor Analysis and Applications with J.E. Marsden and T. Ratiu, and the highly successful four-volume Dynamics, the Geometry of Behavior with C.D. Shaw. His latest book entitled, Trialogues on the Edge of the West is a group of discussions with Terence McKenna and Rupert Sheldrake on the relationship between science, philosophy and religion.
Traveling through Europe in his twenties, living in a cave in northern India and working as a professional gambler in Las Vegas were all experiences which helped to shape Ralph's philosophical outlook. He has been active on the research frontier of dynamics in mathematics since 1960, and in applications and experiments, since 1973. In 1975 he founded the Visual Mathematics Project at the University of California, Santa Cruz to explore the use of interactive computer graphics in teaching mathematics. He is the founding editor of Eagle Mathematics and Applied Global Analysis.
We talked with Ralph on March 4th 1989, in the cozy· living room of our dear and mutual friend Nina Graboi, who has often worked as his editor. We found him to be a soft-spoken, intensely thoughtful and down-to-earth character, with the gentle tone of a person who has become philosophically resigned to seeing further than others.
RMN