Christopher Essex

Christopher Essex (BSc [Hon.], UWO, 1976; MS, Rice University, 1978; PhD, York University, 1982) is Professor and Associate Chair in the Department of Applied Mathematics at the University of Western Ontario. He is former director of its Theoretical Physics Program.

He is known for his pioneering work on the thermodynamics of photon and neutrino radiation. Among many international invitations to speak on this topic, he has taught at the UNESCO advanced school in Udine, Italy, and in June of 2011 his work was featured at the Joint European Thermodynamics Conference in Chemnitz Germany (JETC 11). Professor Essex is also co-discoverer of the entropy production paradox of anomalous superdiffusion.

His work also includes applications of dynamical systems theory, such as chaos cryptography and recently, the limits of modeling and computation, among other applications of mathematics. By invitation, he has been organizing for and participating in meetings of the World Federation of Scientists in Erice, Sicily. He has co-chaired sessions there with Antonino Zichichi and Nobel Laureate T.D. Lee. In January 2011, he was a guest at the Vatican where he discovered modern mathematics encoded in the ancient floor tiles of one of the Vatican Museums.

Dr. Essex held an NSERC postdoctoral fellowship from 1982-84. He also held an Alexander von Humboldt Research Fellowship in Frankfurt, Germany (1986-87). In 2002-03 he was a sabbaticant at the Niels Bohr Institute in Copenhagen, Denmark, supported by a Danish National Bank foreign academics program. He is an award-winning teacher and a recipient, with Ross McKitrick, of the $10,000 Donner Prize in 2002, for the book Taken by Storm on global warming—now in its second edition. That book was a finalist for the 2002 Canadian Science Writers’ Book Award. He is coauthor with Robert Adams of Calculus: A Complete Course, 7^th edition. He was first appointed to NSERC in 2007 and is now in his second term.