Accomplishments at
the University
of Wisconsin
Julien Clinton Sprott
March 2008
Prof. Sprott began his association with the University of Wisconsin
as a graduate student in physics
in September, 1964 after receiving a bachelor’s degree in physics from
MIT. His
Ph.D. thesis was on Behavior of RF Heated Plasmas in a Toroidal
Octupole
Magnetic Field under the
supervision of Donald W. Kerst. After graduating in 1969, he spent a
year as a
postdoc jointly in Physics and Electrical Engineering before taking a
position
at Oak Ridge National Laboratory. In 1973 he returned to the University
as an
Assistant Professor of Physics. He was promoted to Associate Professor
in 1977
and to full professor in 1979.
His early research
was on heating and confinement of plasmas in the Toroidal Octupole and
in the Levitated
Octupole. He proposed, designed, and supervised the construction and
operation of
the Tokapole II poloidal divertor tokamak. After the retirement of
Prof. Kerst
in 1980, he served as principal investigator of the plasma physics
program for
the following six years, during which time the Madison Symmetric Torus
was
proposed, designed, and constructed. He oversaw its initial operation
and
achieved the first reversed field pinch plasmas in the device. He has
consulted
with a dozen different organizations including ORNL, McDonnell-Douglas,
Argonne
National Lab, TRW, Honeywell, and the Chicago Museum of Science and
Industry.
In 1989, his interests
turned to computational nonlinear dynamics, and he has lectured,
collaborated,
and published widely in that area over the past two decades. He has
developed a
number of new chaotic systems and electronic circuits, one of which is
marketed
by PASCO
Scientific. In 1994 he initiated and continues to organize a
weekly
campus-wide seminar on Chaos and
Complex Systems.
In 1984 Prof.
Sprott began a program called The Wonders of
Physics, a popular
lecture/demonstration program for the general public. He has made 202
presentations over the past 25 years to an estimated audience of 60,000
people.
For the past 20 years, he has supervised a traveling version of the
show that
has been given (by others) approximately 1000 times in schools and
other
settings in all 72 Wisconsin counties, 28 states, and 3 countries. He
has
produced a Lecture Kit, 24 hours of videos, two educational software
programs,
one of which won the first annual Computers in Physics contest
for innovative
educational software, and a book on Physics
Demonstrations. He
maintains
a very popular web site with much educational
material.
He has published
over 300 technical papers and abstracts and has
written six books,
including
two textbooks, Introduction to Modern Electronics (still used
in Physics
321) and Chaos and Time-Series Analysis;
two popularizations, Strange
Attractors and Images of a Complex World;
and a translation
of Numerical
Recipes into BASIC. He has produced commercial
software for the
analysis of
chaotic data. He supervised the theses of 18 Ph.D.
students, some of
whom went
on to win awards for their work in plasma physics.
He has taught twelve
different courses in the Department
including electronics, plasma,
modern
physics, chaos, and all the general physics courses. He has served on
most
departmental committees, has been a faculty senator for eleven years,
and was
chair of an L&S committee on Science and Math Education.
Prof. Sprott was
elected a fellow of the American Physical Society in 1980, received the
John
Glover award from Dickinson
College in 1994,
the Van
Hise Outreach Teaching award from UW in 1997, and a Lifetime
Achievement Award
from the Wisconsin Association of Physics Teachers in 1999.