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WEEKLY FEATURED AUTHOR

SCHOLARPEDIA ARTICLES

Attractor

Scholarpedia, 1(11):1815. (2006)

John Willard Milnor (b. February 20, 1931) was educated at Princeton University, receiving his Ph.D. in 1954. He was appointed to the faculty in Princeton after completing his doctoral studies. At present, Dr. Milnor is a distinguished professor at the State University of New York at Stony Brook.

John Milnor won the Fields Medal in 1962 for his work in differential topology. He received the National Medal of Science in 1967 and was elected a member of the National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Science. Milnor won the Wolf Prize in Mathematics in 1989 and the Steele Prize for exposition in 2004.

John Milnor has been an editor of the Annals of Mathematics for many years. His books include Topology from the Differentiable Viewpoint, Morse Theory (with Michael Spivak and Robert Wells), Characteristic Classes (with James Stasheff), Lectures on the h-Cobordism Theorem (with Larry Siebenmann and Jonathan Sondow), Singular Points of Complex Hypersurfaces, and Dynamics in One Complex Variable.

In 1985 Dr. Milnor wrote one of the most influential papers in dynamical systems, On the concept of attractor (Commum. Math. Phys. 99, 177-195), in which he provided rigorous definitions of attractors (some are known as Milnor Attractors).

(originally featured 15 November 2006)

Previously featured authors

Author profile by Eugene Izhikevich.

Each week Scholarpedia recognizes a different contributing author by featuring a short bio of them on the home page.

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