Lee Segel

Lee Aaron Segel was an applied mathematician primarily at the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and the Weizmann Institute of Science. He is particularly known for his work in the spontaneous appearance of order in convection, slime molds and chemotaxis.

Lee Segel was born in 1932 in Newton, Massachusetts to Minna Segel, an art teacher, and Louis Segel, a partner in the OppenheimSegel tailors. Louis Segel was something of an intellectual as could be seen in his house from, e.g., the Kollwitz and Beckman prints and the Shakespeare and Co. edition of Ulysses, all purchased in Europe in the 1930s. Both parents were of JewishLithuanian origin, of families that immigrated to Boston near the end of the 19th century. The seeds of Segels later huge vocabulary could partly be seen to stem from his fathers reading a claim that the main effect of a prep school was on the vocabulary of its graduates. Segel graduated from Harvard in 1953, majoring in mathematics. Thinking he might want to go into the brandnew field of computers, he started graduate studies in MIT, where he concentrated on applied mathematics instead.

Source: Wikipedia