Puzzling over pests: Holmes finds logic in peculiar movements of cockroaches

by Steven Schultz
The slow-motion video shows a cockroach barreling full tilt across the camera's field of view. The bug catches one leg on a small obstacle and spins nearly all the way around, its six legs flying wildly. The flurry of action, however, coalesces into an amazingly rapid recovery, and an instant later the cockroach has left the screen on its original path.

For Professor Philip Holmes, this performance is a puzzle -- a complex, seemingly messy behavior that contains a hidden logic. With a career that has taken him from chaos theory to cockroaches, Holmes is known as a master of reducing such mysteries to their mathematical essence, then rebuilding them into general principles that are applicable to many other areas, from robotics to neuroscience.

Holmes' ability to cut through problems comes not just from his mathematical skills but also from what colleagues say is his uncommon ability to see beyond the confines of his discipline and bridge the specialized languages of different fields. He was trained as an engineer, shifted toward mathematics, then developed an interest in neurobiology. He currently is a professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering and applied and computational mathematics at Princeton. He also writes poetry, with four collections published over the last 35 years.

''He writes poetry, but he also writes great scientific papers,'' said Robert Full, a professor of integrative biology at the University of California-Berkeley who collaborates with Holmes. ''He's really the kind of person who can do these collaborations, because it takes someone who can communicate. I've talked to a lot of mathematicians and couldn't understand a word they said. But that's not the case with Phil Holmes.''

Read the full story in the Weekly Bulletin.