The American physicist Mitchell Jay Feigenbaum (born 1944) laid the foundations for studying the world of complicated events in nature by recognizing patterns underlying the application of mathematical equations.

Mitchell Jay Feigenbaum was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, on December 19, 1944. His father was a chemist working for the government and subsequently for industry, while his mother taught in the public schools. Feigenbaum proceeded from Samuel J. Tilden High School to the City College of New York, whereby he received a bachelor's degree in electrical engineering in 1964. Although that field had been his first love, he found his tastes moving in the direction of physics and went to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology for his graduate work. He earned his doctorate in elementary particle physics there in 1970 and took a position at Cornell the same year.

There was little to distinguish Feigenbaum's career at Cornell and later at Virginia Polytechnic Institute...