Annual Joseph Ford Commemorative Lecture
Joseph Ford was one of the pioneers in the field of chaotic dynamics in the 1960's and spent most of his 34-year career at the Georgia Tech School of Physics furthering this discipline. He dedicated his time between research, in which he was supported largely by the National Science Foundation, and education, either through conferences or in the classroom.
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Recent Submissions
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The Neuromechanics of Insect Locomotion: How Cockroaches Run Fast and Stably Without (Much) Thought
(Georgia Institute of Technology, 2013-03-11)I will describe several models for running insects, from an energy-conserving biped, through a muscle-actuated hexapod driven by a neural central pattern generator, to a reduced phaseoscillator model that captures the ... -
God Does Play Dice: How Chaos Crafted the Kuiper Belt, Why Quantum Mechanics is Craps, and other Curmudgeonly Concepts
(Georgia Institute of Technology, 2012-04-09)Joseph Ford saw beauty in "Chaos" and the potential for ``villainous chaos" to be used in a constructive manner. His ideas have proved prescient. The talk will focus mainly on how chaotic dynamics may have played a key ... -
Twistor Theory, Then and Now
(Georgia Institute of Technology, 2009-03-25)Twistor theory is now over 45 years old. In December 1963, I proposed the initial ideas of this scheme, based on complex-number geometry, which presents an alternative perspective to that of standard 4-dimensional space-time, ...