Mitchell Feigenbaum

Mitchell Feigenbaum was an American mathematical physicist who lived from 1944 to 2019, renowned for discovering the Feigenbaum constants through his study of period-doubling bifurcations, showing that the ratio between successive period-doubling bifurcations tends toward a universal constant of about 4.6692, a pattern found across diverse nonlinear systems. After positions at Cornell University, Virginia Polytechnic Institute and Los Alamos National Laboratory, he joined the Rockefeller University in 1987 as Toyota Professor, remaining there until his death, and also founded the financial software company Numerix in 1996. He received a MacArthur Fellowship in 1983 and the Dannie Heineman Prize for Mathematical Physics in 2008. He received the Wolf Prize in Physics in 1986, shared with Albert Libchaber.