RIP Boris Chirikov (1928-2008)

Here's another death I missed, and in this particular case I am very surprised that it escaped my notice. On February 12th, Boris Chirikov, one of the founding fathers of both Hamiltonian chaos and quantum chaos, died. I got my Ph.D. thesis in quantum chaos, and of course this blog is named after that field. I continue to do research in both of these subjects, which are near and dear to my heart. Among Chirikov's contributions to these fields are his development of his eponymous Chirikov overlap criterion (which played an important role in the investigation of chaos in the Fermi-Pasta-Ulam problem and describes the transition from locally chaotic dynamics to globally chaotic dynamics) and equally eponymous Chirikov-Taylor map (aka, the "standard map").

Update: Here is a link to the obituary in the online version of Physics Today.