Richard F. Voss

Location:

• Yorktown Heights, NY, United States of America

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Bio:

• SIGGRAPH 1994

  Richard F. Voss is an internationally recognized physicist and popular lecturer on fractals. He has presented over 120 major invited lectures on fractal geometry and has published  over 75 scientific articles. Born in 1948 in Minnesota, he received a B.S. degree in physics from M.I.T in 1970 and a National Science Foundation Fellowship for graduate studies. After receiving a Ph.D. in physics from the University of California at Berkeley in 1975 he joined the IBM Research Division as a Research Staff Member. At IBM he worked closely with Dr. Benoit Mandelbrot {the “father” of fractals) and continued his research in condensed matter physics. His mastery of scientific computer graphics has been instrumental in the rapid acceptance of fractals as a useful language. His computer generated images have appeared widely in numerous magazines, books, television shows, IBM commercials, and on the covers of The Fractal Geometry of Nature and The Turbulent Mirror. He is a co-author of the book The Science of Fractal Images published by Springer-Verlag in 1987 and he was chairman of the 1988 Gordon Research Conference of Fractals.

  His research in condensed matter physics includes low temperature macroscopic quantum phenomena in Josephson junction devices, 1/f noise, and the fractal characteristics of random media and growth processes. He has been elected a Fellow of the American Physical Society, to membership in Sigma Xi, and he has received major IBM internal awards for his work on macroscopic quantum tunneling and on random fractals. He has had sabbatical assignments at U.C. Santa Barbara and Harvard University. He has been honored as the 1987-8 Siefert Memorial Lecturer at Montana State University, a 1987-8 Distinguished Lecturer at Trinity University, a 1990 Distinguished Lecturer at Utah State University, 1992 Hayes lecturer at Oberlin and a visiting professor at the Universities of Bremen and Oslo. In 1993 he was elected Professor of Applied Physics, adjunct, at Yale University while continuing association with IBM Research as a visiting scientist. He is currently teaching a Yale undergraduate course on Fractal Geometry and is working on a book about Chaos, Fractals, and Art with the NY sculptor, Rhonda Shearer. 

  SIGGRAPH 1991

  *1948 in St. Paul, Minnesota, 1970 B.S. in Physics from M.I.T. 1975 Ph.D in Physics from U.C. Berkeley where, from a condensed matter physics background, he became interested in fluctuation phenomena, 1/f noise (and its relation to shapes and music melodies), and the early work of Benoit Mandelbrot.1975-present Research Staff Member at the IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Laboratory in Yorktown Heights, NY. He continues to work closely with Benoit Mandelbrot. He is a Fellow of the American Physical Society and a member of the Materials Research Society. His research in condensed matter physics includes low temperature macroscopic quantum phenomena in Josephson junction devices, 1/f noise, and the fractal characteristics of random media and growth processes. He has had sabbatical assignments at U.C. Santa Barbara and Harvard. He has been named Siefert Memorial Lecturer at the University of Montana in Bozeman and a Distinguished Lecturer at Trinity University in Texas.