Chris Essex

Christopher Essex is Professor of Applied Mathematics at the University of Western Ontario. In 2003, he was invited to teach on the thermodynamics of photon and neutrino radiation at the UNESCO advanced school in Udine, Italy. He is also known for work on anomalous diffusion, especially on superdiffusion and extraordinary differential equations. In connection with that, he is codiscoverer with K.H. Hoffmann of the superdiffusion entropy production paradox. He has also worked on applications of dynamical systems theory, such as chaos cryptography, and recently the limits of computation, among other applications of mathematics. By invitation, he has been organizing annual sessions for the World Federation of Scientists in Erice, Sicily on different aspects of the limits of climate forecasting. He has cochaired those sessions with Antonino Zichichi of CERN and Nobel Laureate T.D. Lee. He held an NSERC postdoctoral fellowship in the Canadian Climate Centre's general circulation modelling group (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 academic's program. He is an award-winning teacher and a recipient, with Ross McKitrick, of the $10,000 Donner Prize for 2002, for the book Taken by Storm: the Troubled Science, Policy, and Politics of Global Warming-now in its second edition. That book was also a finalist for the 2002 Canadian Science Writers' Book Award. In November 2007 he was a panelist and featured speaker at the Chicago Humanities Festival on the theme of climate angst. He is also coauthor with Robert Adams of Calculus: A Complete Course, 7th edition. In December 2007 he was a guest of the Vatican. In 2007 he was commissioned by the Queen to serve on the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada.