Photo by Frank Wojciechowski
By the Office of Engineering Communications
February 12, 2025
Philip John Holmes, who harnessed the mathematics of chaos for engineering applications, has been elected a member of the National Academy of Engineering (NAE), announced on Feb. 11. Membership in the NAE is widely seen as one of the highest honors in the engineering profession.
Holmes, professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering, emeritus, was elected for “the application of methods of nonlinear analysis and chaotic dynamics to engineering systems.” He developed foundational mathematical tools to analyze and predict the behavior of chaotic systems. He has applied these tools to study real-world problems including turbulence, animal movement, and brain and nervous system functions. He co-authored four textbooks on dynamical systems, chaos theory, and complex 3D flows. His 1983 textbook, “Nonlinear Oscillations, Dynamical Systems, and Bifurcations of Vector Fields,” co-authored with John Guckenheimer, is considered a landmark work for studying the behavior of complex systems across scientific disciplines.
Holmes is an associated faculty member in mathematics and the Princeton Neuroscience Institute. He directed Princeton’s Program in Applied Computational Mathematics from 1994 to 1997 and again in 2010 and 2011. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences; a fellow of the American Physical Society, the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics, and the American Mathematical Society; and an honorary member of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. He has also published four collections of poetry; the second won an Eric Gregory Award (U.K. Society of Authors) in 1975 and the third, “The Green Road,” was a Poetry Book Society recommendation for 1986. His fourth collection, “Lighting the Steps,” was published by Anvil Press in 2002.
Holmes joined Princeton in 1994 as a professor of mechanics and applied mathematics. He earned his bachelor’s degree in engineering science at the University of Oxford and his Ph.D. in engineering at the University of Southampton in 1974. His first academic position was at Cornell University as a professor of theoretical and applied mechanics. He retired in 2015 after 42 years as a professor, including 20 at Princeton. He supervised 37 Ph.D. and three master’s theses and mentored 25 postdoctoral scholars.
The National Academy of Engineers also elected Yueh-Lin (Lynn) Loo, the Theodora D. '78 and William H. Walton III '74 Professor in Engineering, a professor of chemical and biological engineering, and four Princeton alumni — Marsha Anderson Bomar, Susan L. Brantley, Pei Cao and Marian Gindy — to the 2025 class, which included 128 members and 22 international members. Read the story here.