Lee Segel
Encyclopedia
Lee Segel was an applied mathematician
primarily at the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute
and the Weizmann Institute of Science
. He is particularly known for his work in the spontaneous appearance of order in convection
, slime molds and chemotaxis
.
to Minna Segel, an art teacher, and Louis Segel, a partner in the Oppenheim-Segel tailors. Louis Segel was something of an intellectual as could be seen in his house from, e.g., the Kollwitz and Beckman prints and the Shakespeare and Co. edition of 'Ulysses', all purchased in Europe in the 30's. Both parents were of Jewish-Lithuanian
origin, of families that immigrated to Boston
near the end of the 19th century. The seeds of Segel's later huge vocabulary could partly be seen to stem from his father's reading (and acting on) a claim that the main effect of a prep school was on the vocabulary of its graduates. Segel graduated from Harvard in 1953, majoring in mathematics. Thinking he might want to go into the brand-new field of computers, he started graduate studies in MIT, where he concentrated on applied mathematics
instead.
In 1959 he married Ruth Galinski, a lawyer and a distant cousin, in her native London
, where they spent the first two years of their wedded life. Later 4 children were born (Joel '61, Susan '62, Daniel '64 and Michael '66), and still later, 18 grandchildren.
faculty at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute
. In 1970 he spent a sabbatical at Cornell Medical School and the Sloan-Kettering Institute. Segel moved from RPI to the Weizmann Institute in 1973, where he became the chairman of the Applied Mathematics department, and later dean of the Faculty of Mathematical Sciences and chair of the Scientific Council. At Los Alamos National Laboratory
he was a summer consultant to the theoretical biology group from 1984 to 1999, and he was named Ulam Visiting Scholar for 1992-93.
problem. Segel's most quoted paper in this field was his last work in this field; it was published in parallel with the work of Newell and Whitehead. These papers gave an explanation of the seemingly spontaneous appearance of patterns - rolls or honeycomb cells - in liquid sufficiently heated from below (Bénard convection patterns). (Preceding this was the Turing pattern formation, proposed in 1952 by Alan Turing
to describe chemical patterns.) Technically the tool was that of deriving "amplitude" equations from the full Navier-Stokes equations
, simplified equations describing the evolution of a slowly changing wave amplitude of the roiling liquid; this amplitude equation was later described as the Newell-Whitehead-Segel equation.
he developed a model for slime mold (Dictyostelium discoideum) dynamics that was perhaps the first example of what was later called an "emergent system"; e.g. in Steven Johnson's
2001 book Emergence: The Connected Lives of Ants, Brains, Cities, and Software
slime mold is 'the main character'. Slime mold amoeba can gang together into a single multicellular aggregate (akin to a multicellular organism) to find food; Keller and Segel showed that simple assumptions about secretion of an attractive chemical (cyclic AMP) to which identical amoeba-like
cells are attracted could explain such behavior without positing any master cell that manages the procedure.
They also developed a model for chemotaxis
. Hillen and Painter say of it: "its success ... a consequence of its intuitive simplicity, analytical tractability and capacity to replicate key behaviour of chemotactic populations. One such property, the ability to display 'auto-aggregation,' has led to its prominence as a mechanism for self-organisation of biological systems. This phenomenon has been shown to lead to finite-time blow-up under certain formulations of the model, and a large body of work has been devoted to determining when blow-up occurs or whether globally existing solutions exist".
A paper with Jackson was the first to apply Turing's reaction-diffusion, to population dynamics
. Lee Segel also found a way to explain the mechanism from a more intuitive perspective than had previously been done.
(Israel Prize
'04), Amir Pnueli (Turing Prize '96, Israel Prize '00), Adi Shamir
(Turing Prize '02) and Shimon Ullman
.
Segel was the editor of the Bulletin of Mathematical Biology between 1986 and 2002.
And Editor of:
for 1992-93.
The Sixth Israeli Mini-Workshop in Applied Mathematics was dedicated to the his memory.
Springer Press, in partnership with the Society for Mathematical Biology
, funds Lee Segel Prizes for the best original research paper published (awarded every 2 years), a prize of 3,000 dollars for the best student research paper (awarded every 2 years), and a prize of 4,000 dollars for the best review paper (awarded every 3 years). The Faculty of Mathematics and Computer Science at the Weizmannn Institute awards a yearly Lee A. Segel Prize in Theoretical Biology.
Applied mathematics
Applied mathematics is a branch of mathematics that concerns itself with mathematical methods that are typically used in science, engineering, business, and industry. Thus, "applied mathematics" is a mathematical science with specialized knowledge...
primarily at the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute
Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute
Stephen Van Rensselaer established the Rensselaer School on November 5, 1824 with a letter to the Rev. Dr. Samuel Blatchford, in which van Rensselaer asked Blatchford to serve as the first president. Within the letter he set down several orders of business. He appointed Amos Eaton as the school's...
and the Weizmann Institute of Science
Weizmann Institute of Science
The Weizmann Institute of Science , known as Machon Weizmann, is a university and research institute in Rehovot, Israel. It differs from other Israeli universities in that it offers only graduate and post-graduate studies in the sciences....
. He is particularly known for his work in the spontaneous appearance of order in convection
Convection
Convection is the movement of molecules within fluids and rheids. It cannot take place in solids, since neither bulk current flows nor significant diffusion can take place in solids....
, slime molds and chemotaxis
Chemotaxis
Chemotaxis is the phenomenon in which somatic cells, bacteria, and other single-cell or multicellular organisms direct their movements according to certain chemicals in their environment. This is important for bacteria to find food by swimming towards the highest concentration of food molecules,...
.
Biography
Lee Segel was born in 1932 in Newton, MassachusettsNewton, Massachusetts
Newton is a city in Middlesex County, Massachusetts, United States bordered to the east by Boston. According to the 2010 U.S. Census, the population of Newton was 85,146, making it the eleventh largest city in the state.-Villages:...
to Minna Segel, an art teacher, and Louis Segel, a partner in the Oppenheim-Segel tailors. Louis Segel was something of an intellectual as could be seen in his house from, e.g., the Kollwitz and Beckman prints and the Shakespeare and Co. edition of 'Ulysses', all purchased in Europe in the 30's. Both parents were of Jewish-Lithuanian
Lithuanian Jews
Lithuanian Jews or Litvaks are Jews with roots in the Grand Duchy of Lithuania:...
origin, of families that immigrated to Boston
Boston
Boston is the capital of and largest city in Massachusetts, and is one of the oldest cities in the United States. The largest city in New England, Boston is regarded as the unofficial "Capital of New England" for its economic and cultural impact on the entire New England region. The city proper had...
near the end of the 19th century. The seeds of Segel's later huge vocabulary could partly be seen to stem from his father's reading (and acting on) a claim that the main effect of a prep school was on the vocabulary of its graduates. Segel graduated from Harvard in 1953, majoring in mathematics. Thinking he might want to go into the brand-new field of computers, he started graduate studies in MIT, where he concentrated on applied mathematics
Applied mathematics
Applied mathematics is a branch of mathematics that concerns itself with mathematical methods that are typically used in science, engineering, business, and industry. Thus, "applied mathematics" is a mathematical science with specialized knowledge...
instead.
In 1959 he married Ruth Galinski, a lawyer and a distant cousin, in her native London
London
London is the capital city of :England and the :United Kingdom, the largest metropolitan area in the United Kingdom, and the largest urban zone in the European Union by most measures. Located on the River Thames, London has been a major settlement for two millennia, its history going back to its...
, where they spent the first two years of their wedded life. Later 4 children were born (Joel '61, Susan '62, Daniel '64 and Michael '66), and still later, 18 grandchildren.
Career
Lee Segel received a PhD from MIT in 1959, under the supervision of C. C. Lin. In 1960, he joined the Applied MathematicsApplied mathematics
Applied mathematics is a branch of mathematics that concerns itself with mathematical methods that are typically used in science, engineering, business, and industry. Thus, "applied mathematics" is a mathematical science with specialized knowledge...
faculty at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute
Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute
Stephen Van Rensselaer established the Rensselaer School on November 5, 1824 with a letter to the Rev. Dr. Samuel Blatchford, in which van Rensselaer asked Blatchford to serve as the first president. Within the letter he set down several orders of business. He appointed Amos Eaton as the school's...
. In 1970 he spent a sabbatical at Cornell Medical School and the Sloan-Kettering Institute. Segel moved from RPI to the Weizmann Institute in 1973, where he became the chairman of the Applied Mathematics department, and later dean of the Faculty of Mathematical Sciences and chair of the Scientific Council. At Los Alamos National Laboratory
Los Alamos National Laboratory
Los Alamos National Laboratory is a United States Department of Energy national laboratory, managed and operated by Los Alamos National Security , located in Los Alamos, New Mexico...
he was a summer consultant to the theoretical biology group from 1984 to 1999, and he was named Ulam Visiting Scholar for 1992-93.
Hydrodynamics
In 1967 Segel and Scanlon were the first to analyze a non-linear convectionConvection
Convection is the movement of molecules within fluids and rheids. It cannot take place in solids, since neither bulk current flows nor significant diffusion can take place in solids....
problem. Segel's most quoted paper in this field was his last work in this field; it was published in parallel with the work of Newell and Whitehead. These papers gave an explanation of the seemingly spontaneous appearance of patterns - rolls or honeycomb cells - in liquid sufficiently heated from below (Bénard convection patterns). (Preceding this was the Turing pattern formation, proposed in 1952 by Alan Turing
Alan Turing
Alan Mathison Turing, OBE, FRS , was an English mathematician, logician, cryptanalyst, and computer scientist. He was highly influential in the development of computer science, providing a formalisation of the concepts of "algorithm" and "computation" with the Turing machine, which played a...
to describe chemical patterns.) Technically the tool was that of deriving "amplitude" equations from the full Navier-Stokes equations
Navier-Stokes equations
In physics, the Navier–Stokes equations, named after Claude-Louis Navier and George Gabriel Stokes, describe the motion of fluid substances. These equations arise from applying Newton's second law to fluid motion, together with the assumption that the fluid stress is the sum of a diffusing viscous...
, simplified equations describing the evolution of a slowly changing wave amplitude of the roiling liquid; this amplitude equation was later described as the Newell-Whitehead-Segel equation.
Patterns
With Evelyn KellerEvelyn Fox Keller
Evelyn Fox Keller is an American physicist, author and feminist. She is currently a Professor of History and Philosophy of Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Keller has also taught at the State University of New York at Purchase, New York University and in the department of...
he developed a model for slime mold (Dictyostelium discoideum) dynamics that was perhaps the first example of what was later called an "emergent system"; e.g. in Steven Johnson's
Steven Berlin Johnson
Steven Berlin Johnson is an American popular science author.-Education:Steven Johnson attended the prestigious St. Albans School as a youth. He completed his undergraduate degree at Brown University, where he studied semiotics, a part of Brown's modern culture and media department...
2001 book Emergence: The Connected Lives of Ants, Brains, Cities, and Software
Emergence: The Connected Lives of Ants, Brains, Cities, and Software
Emergence: The Connected Lives of Ants, Brains, Cities, and Software is a book written by Steven Berlin Johnson, published in 2001. Early review drafts had the subtitle "What the New Science Can Teach Us About Our Minds, Our Communities, and Ourselves" instead of the "Connected life..."...
slime mold is 'the main character'. Slime mold amoeba can gang together into a single multicellular aggregate (akin to a multicellular organism) to find food; Keller and Segel showed that simple assumptions about secretion of an attractive chemical (cyclic AMP) to which identical amoeba-like
cells are attracted could explain such behavior without positing any master cell that manages the procedure.
They also developed a model for chemotaxis
Chemotaxis
Chemotaxis is the phenomenon in which somatic cells, bacteria, and other single-cell or multicellular organisms direct their movements according to certain chemicals in their environment. This is important for bacteria to find food by swimming towards the highest concentration of food molecules,...
. Hillen and Painter say of it: "its success ... a consequence of its intuitive simplicity, analytical tractability and capacity to replicate key behaviour of chemotactic populations. One such property, the ability to display 'auto-aggregation,' has led to its prominence as a mechanism for self-organisation of biological systems. This phenomenon has been shown to lead to finite-time blow-up under certain formulations of the model, and a large body of work has been devoted to determining when blow-up occurs or whether globally existing solutions exist".
A paper with Jackson was the first to apply Turing's reaction-diffusion, to population dynamics
Population dynamics
Population dynamics is the branch of life sciences that studies short-term and long-term changes in the size and age composition of populations, and the biological and environmental processes influencing those changes...
. Lee Segel also found a way to explain the mechanism from a more intuitive perspective than had previously been done.
Administration
In 1975 Segel was appointed Dean of the Faculty of Mathematics in the Weizmann Institute. A central project was renewing the computer science aspect of the department by bringing simultaneously 4 young leading researchers whom he dubbed the 'Gang of Four' - David HarelDavid Harel
David Harel is a professor of computer science at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel. Born in London, England, he was Dean of the Faculty of Mathematics and Computer Science at the institute for seven years.-Biography:...
(Israel Prize
Israel Prize
The Israel Prize is an award handed out by the State of Israel and is largely regarded as the state's highest honor. It is presented annually, on Israeli Independence Day, in a state ceremony in Jerusalem, in the presence of the President, the Prime Minister, the Knesset chairperson, and the...
'04), Amir Pnueli (Turing Prize '96, Israel Prize '00), Adi Shamir
Adi Shamir
Adi Shamir is an Israeli cryptographer. He is a co-inventor of the RSA algorithm , a co-inventor of the Feige–Fiat–Shamir identification scheme , one of the inventors of differential cryptanalysis and has made numerous contributions to the fields of cryptography and computer...
(Turing Prize '02) and Shimon Ullman
Shimon Ullman
Shimon Ullman is a professor of computer science at the Weizmann Institute of Science, Israel. Ullman's main research area is the study of vision processing by both humans and machines. Specifically, he focuses on object and facial recognition, and has made a number of key insights in this field...
.
Segel was the editor of the Bulletin of Mathematical Biology between 1986 and 2002.
Books
Lee Segel was the author of:- Mathematics Applied to Continuum Mechanics (Classics in Applied Mathematics) (with additional material on elasticity by G. H. Handelman)
- Mathematics Applied to Deterministic Problems in the Natural Sciences (Classics in Applied Mathematics)by C. C Lin and Lee A. Segel. This book was made the first volume in the SIAM Classics in Applied Mathematics series.
- Modeling Dynamic Phenomena in Molecular and Cellular Biology stemmed from his course in mathematical modelling that he taught for 20 years in the Weizmann Inst.
And Editor of:
- Biological Delay Systems: Linear Stability Theory (Cambridge Studies in Mathematical Biology) [Paperback] N. MacDonald, C. Cannings, Frank C. Hoppensteadt and Lee A. Segel (Eds.)
- Mathematical models in molecular and cellular biology.
- Design Principles for the Immune System and Other Distributed Autonomous Systems (Santa Fe Institute Studies in the Sciences of Complexity Proceedings)
Honors
Segel was the Ulam Visiting Scholar of the Santa Fe InstituteSanta Fe Institute
The Santa Fe Institute is an independent, nonprofit theoretical research institute located in Santa Fe and dedicated to the multidisciplinary study of the fundamental principles of complex adaptive systems, including physical, computational, biological, and social systems.The Institute houses a...
for 1992-93.
The Sixth Israeli Mini-Workshop in Applied Mathematics was dedicated to the his memory.
Springer Press, in partnership with the Society for Mathematical Biology
Society for Mathematical Biology
The Society for Mathematical Biology is an international association co-founded in 1972 in USA by Drs.George Karreman, Herbert Daniel Landahl and by Anthony Bartholomay for the furtherance of joint scientific activities between Mathematics and Biology research communities,...
, funds Lee Segel Prizes for the best original research paper published (awarded every 2 years), a prize of 3,000 dollars for the best student research paper (awarded every 2 years), and a prize of 4,000 dollars for the best review paper (awarded every 3 years). The Faculty of Mathematics and Computer Science at the Weizmannn Institute awards a yearly Lee A. Segel Prize in Theoretical Biology.