Harry L. Swinney
The University of Texas at Austin
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Primary Section: 33, Applied Physical Sciences Secondary Section: 13, Physics Membership Type:
Member
(elected 1992)
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Biosketch
In the 1960s Swinney’s research as a PhD student and subsequently as a postdoc at Johns Hopkins University was on critical phenomena in fluids. He held faculty appointments at New York University (1971-73), City College of New York (1973-78), and the University of Texas at Austin (1978-). In studies of systems driven away from thermodynamic equilibrium, Swinney and his collaborators have observed, developed, or discovered: a transition to chaos in fluid flows in various geometries; a laboratory model of Jupiter’s Great Red Spot; anomalous diffusion and Lévy flights in geostrophic flows; spatial patterns in chemical systems, as predicted by Turing; localized structures (“oscillons”) in oscillating granular materials; methods for determining the largest Lyapunov exponent and Shannon’s mutual information in chaotic systems; the same fractal dimension (1.7) of edges of some leaves, flowers, dendrites, viscous fingers, and bacterial colonies; a protein that is lethal to Paenibacillus dendritiformis bacteria; fluctuations in the number N of swimming bacteria in a fixed volume are proportional to N^(3/4) rather than to N^(1/2) as in thermal equilibrium; a resonance in oceanic internal waves selects the angle of continental slopes (about 3 degrees); crystallites appear in sheared random packings of spheres when the volume fraction reaches 0.646±0.001 (random close packing).
