Albert Libchaber

Albert Libchaber is a French-born physicist, born in 1934, known for the first experimental observation of the bifurcation cascade leading to chaos and turbulence in convective Rayleigh-Benard systems, confirming Mitchell Feigenbaum theoretical predictions about the route to chaos through period-doubling. He held positions at the Ecole Normale Superieure until 1982, the University of Chicago from 1983 to 1991 and Princeton University from 1991 to 1994, before becoming Detlev W. Bronk Professor at the Rockefeller University in 1994, where his research since the 1990s has turned to biological systems studied through physics and nonlinear dynamics. He received the Prix des Trois Physiciens from the Fondation de France in 1999. He received the Wolf Prize in Physics in 1986, shared with Mitchell Feigenbaum.