Science Award Surprises Expert on Unpredictable

A Los Angeles professor who studies unpredictable events learned this week that he had been awarded $50,000 by an Israeli science foundation--much to his surprise.

Lennart Carleson, a professor of mathematics at UCLA and at the University of Uppsala in Sweden, said he did not know that he had been nominated for the award. Carleson said that when he opened his mail this week, “I learned that I’d won, much to my astonishment.”

Carleson, a native of Sweden, specializes in “chaos theory,” the study of unpredictable events. He splits his time between UCLA and Uppsala, near Stockholm. He was one of two winners of the 1992 Wolf Prize, awarded by the Wolf Foundation of Israel, which cited him as “one of the greatest analysts of the 20th Century.”

The 63-year-old professor said he did not know why he was nominated. “There are some problems that I solved that attracted certain attention, but that was a long time ago,” he said. Chaos theory, he added, involves taking “really simple cases and trying to understand them in detail.”