Jürgen Kurths#

Laudatio by Peter Hänggi#


Professor Dr. rer. nat., Dr. rer. nat. habil, Dr. h. c. Jtirgen Kurths, born in 1953, enjoys working in the field of nonlinear dynamics with special emphasis on inter-disciplinary problems. He has obtained his Diploma in mathematics from the Universität Rostock in 1975, his doctorate in theoretical physics from the Academy of Sciences (East Germany) in 1983 and his Habilitation in theoretical physics from the Universität Rostock in 1991. In a special program of the Max-Planck-society, he was selected in 1991 as one of the 27 scientists from East Germany to become a director of a new working group fully supported for 7 years by the Max-Planck-Society. With this start—up he has formed an internationally well-known, highly reputable group on nonlinear dynamics. In 1994 he got a full-chair on theoretical physics/nonlinear dynamics at the Universität Potsdam. Since 2008 he has accepted the joint position of a head of the Research Domain Trans-disciplinary Concepts and Methods of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research and the position of a chair-professor of nonlinear dynamics at the Institute of Physics, Humboldt-Universität, Berlin. He also holds a 6th Century Chair at the King's College of the University Aberdeen (UK). In 2007 he has received offers for endowed chairs at the University of Glasgow and the University of Aberdeen. However, he has decided to stay in Germany.

Professor Kurths has published more than 400 papers in peer-reviewed international journals, among them 39 in Phys. Rev. Lett., on problems of nonlinear dynamics and its applications mainly to medicine and cognitive sciences and more recently to geosciences. His papers have got so far more than 12.000 citations and his h(Hirsch)-factor is now at h=46. He has discovered several basic phenomena in complex systems; among those are phase synchronization and lag synchronization of coupled chaotic oscillators as well as coherence resonance. His works have initiated much theoretical research but have also substantially triggered applications mainly in medicine and more recently in climatology and sustainability research. The new phenomena found by him are widely included in textbooks on nonlinear dynamics, in Wikipedia etc. He is the author (with A. Pikovsky and M. Rosenblum) of the highly acclaimed textbook, entitled: Synchronization: A universal concept in nonlinear sciences. Here, they have developed a comprehensive theory of synchronization in complex systems and have described its potential for versatile applications. Notably, this textbook has been translated into Russian, Japanese and Italian. At the moment he is editor of more than 10 journals and book series, among them Phil, Trans. Roy. Soc. A, CHAOS, Nonlinear Processes in Geophysics, European J Physics - Special Topics, or Springer Series of Complexity.

For his distinguished scientific work he has received several awards and honors, including the joint research award of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation with the CSIR (India) in 2005. He is an elected Fellow of the American Physical Society and has been bestowed with a Dr. h,c. hom the Lobachevsky University in Nizhny Novgorod. He has supervised more than 50 PhD students. More than 20 of his former students have become Professor or other tenured positions all over the world (e.g. Cornell University, Harvard University, University College London, Aberdeen University, JAIST (Japan), Moscow State University, Delhi University, Humboldt—Universitat zu Berlin, Universitat Oldenburg, GFZ—Potsdam etc.).

In addition, he does a great deal of service to scientific communities by accepting positions on national science-committees (DFG) and European Scientific Unions (e.g. President of the Division Nonlinear Processes in Geophysics of the European Geoscience Union, 2000-2005). He has coordinated large international and national projects granted by the EU, DFG, or BMBF etc. Furthermore, he has organized several series of conferences, such as the Experimental Chaos Conferences or Physics and Control.


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