Edward Ott


Edward Ott is an American physicist and electrical engineer, who is a professor at University of Maryland, College Park. He is best known for his contributions to the development of chaos theory.
Ott was born and grew up in New York City. He attended Stuyvesant High School, received his bachelor's degree in electrical engineering from The Cooper Union, and his Ph.D. in electrophysics from The Polytechnic Institute of Brooklyn in 1967. Following receipt of his Ph.D., he was an NSF postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics of Cambridge University. He then joined the faculty of the department of electrical engineering at Cornell University. Since 1979 he has been a faculty member jointly in the department of physics and the department of electrical engineering at The University of Maryland, with the current titles of distinguished university professor, and Yuen Sang and Yuen Kit So Professor. He was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 2022.

Research areas

Prior to his work on chaos and complex systems, Professor Ott had done extensive research in the field of plasma physics. His work on chaos theory and complex systems covers many areas. Some examples are the following:
  • chaotic scattering ;
  • fast magnetic dynamos in chaotic flows ;
  • chaotic transport in Hamilton dynamical systems ;
  • fractal basin boundaries ;
  • communicating with chaos ;
  • transitions of the dynamics of chaotic systems with variation of a system parameter ;
  • quantum chaos ;
  • weather forecasting ; and
  • the dynamics of large networks of interacting units.
In what is perhaps Ott's most well-known contribution, he and his colleagues Celso Grebogi and James A. Yorke introduced the concept of controlling chaos. In particular, they have shown that dynamics on a chaotic attractor can be controlled by using only small perturbations. The key idea in this work is that embedded within a chaotic attractor there are typically an infinite number of unstable periodic orbits, any one of which can be stabilized by a small control, and that, by properly choosing which orbit to stabilize, enhanced performance can be achieved. As part of its 50th anniversary celebration, the journal, Physical Review Letters, selected this paper as one of its milestone publications.

Awards

  • 2014. Julius Edgar Lillienfeld Prize "For pioneering contributions in nonlinear dynamics and chaos theory that have been uniquely influential for physicists and scientists working in many fields."
  • 2016. Citation Laureate in Physics "For their development of a control theory of chaotic systems...."
  • 2017 Lewis Fry Richardson Medal "... for pioneering contributions in the theory of chaos...."
  • 2017 Jurgen Moser Lecture/Award "... for his extensive and influential contributions to nonlinear dynamics, including seminal work on chaos theory and on the dynamics of physical systems."

Books

  • Ott is the author of "Chaos in Dynamical Systems" designed for use as a textbook for graduate physics courses and as a reference for researchers in the field.
  • He is also an editor of the book Coping with Chaos which is a collection of reprints that focuses on how scientists observe, quantify, and control chaos.