Julio Ottino - chaos, the capacity for emergence, and timeless ideas
Every so often someone comes along whose thinking and work inspire you with the kind of awe that always feels new and fills you with an energy that brings vibrancy to life. Julio Mario Ottino is one of these people. Pulling from science, technology, and art, creating entirely new spaces in their convergence, he has transformed how to think about discovery and creativity.
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Julio Mario Ottino is a researcher, engineering scientist, artist, author, and educator. Born in Argentina, he grew up with twin interests in physical sciences and visual arts, finding beauty in math and art, and seeing creativity as being one thing, rather than something living in compartments.
He has brought a new sensibility for creativity to science, recognized as a world leader in the field of mixing of fluids and granular matter. That research has appeared on the covers of Nature, Science, Scientific American, the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the USA, and in James Gleick's book Chaos.
His research in nonlinear dynamics and chaos has reached fields as diverse as geophysics, oceanography, and microfluidics. The breadth of influence of research into chaos and complexity led him to found the Northwestern Institute on Complex Systems that crosses all colleges at the University. NICO is one of the premier institutes for complexity science in the world.
His list of awards and accolades are humbling and far too many to list. To name a few: Elected to the National Academy of Engineering (1997), the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (2003), and the National Academy of Sciences (2022); he was awarded a Guggenheim fellowship in 2001; in 2008, he was identified by the American Institute of Chemical Engineering as one of the “100 Engineers of the Modern Era.”
Recently, he is the author, with Bruce Mau, of The Nexus: Augmented Thinking for a Complex World - The New Convergence of Art, Technology, and Science. The Nexus is as thought-provoking as it is visually striking, a marvel of a book. It has been selected by the Association of American Publishers for a 2023 PROSE Award.
He is currently dean of the Robert R. McCormick School of Engineering and Applied Science at Northwestern University.
Julio might be the most Origins guest ever.