Ivar Ekeland
French mathematician · France · On the map · Academics · Born 1944 · age 82
Ivar I. Ekeland is a French mathematician of Norwegian descent. Ekeland has written influential monographs and textbooks on nonlinear functional analysis, the calculus of variations, and mathematical economics, as well as popular books on mathematics, which have been published in French, English, and other languages.
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![Ivar Ekeland has written popular books about chaos theory and about fractals,[1][2] such as the Julia set (animated). Ekeland's exposition provided mathematical inspiration to Michael Crichton's discussion of chaos in Jurassic Park.[3]](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/1b/Animated_cycle.gif)
Ivar Ekeland has written popular books about chaos theory and about fractals,[1][2] such as the Julia set (animated). Ekeland's exposition provided mathematical inspiration to Michael Crichton's discussion of chaos in Jurassic Park.[3]![Actor Jeff Goldblum consulted Ekeland while preparing to play a mathematician specializing in chaos theory in Spielberg's Jurassic Park.[6]](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/5/56/JeffGoldblum07TIFF.jpg/500px-JeffGoldblum07TIFF.jpg)
Actor Jeff Goldblum consulted Ekeland while preparing to play a mathematician specializing in chaos theory in Spielberg's Jurassic Park.[6]![The Feigenbaum bifurcation of the iterated logistic function system was described as an example of chaos theory in Ekeland's Mathematics and the unexpected.[1]](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/7/7d/LogisticMap_BifurcationDiagram.png/1280px-LogisticMap_BifurcationDiagram.png)
The Feigenbaum bifurcation of the iterated logistic function system was described as an example of chaos theory in Ekeland's Mathematics and the unexpected.[1]Awards
About this person
Ekeland is known as the author of Ekeland's variational principle and for his use of the Shapley-Folkman lemma in optimization theory. He has contributed to the periodic solutions of Hamiltonian systems and particularly to the theory of Kreĭn indices for linear systems. Ekeland is cited in the credits of Steven Spielberg's 1993 movie Jurassic Park as an inspiration of the fictional chaos theory specialist Ian Malcolm appearing in Michael Crichton's 1990 novel Jurassic Park.
