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Ralph Abraham was always looking for the big picture

The late UC Santa Cruz icon Ralph Abraham was a prominent name in chaos theory mathematics, and a counterculture seeker of big truths. But he never viewed math as a separate arena from his search for transcendence. It was central to his conception of reality.

Ralph Abraham taught at Berkeley, Columbia and Princeton before landing at UC Santa Cruz, largely because of his experience at the notorious hippie hangout The Barn in Scotts Valley. He is the author of more than a dozen books, most notably a series of “trialogues” with fellow counterculture intellectual icons biologist Rupert Sheldrake and ethnobotanist Terence McKenna called “Chaos, Creativity and Cosmic Consciousness.” As a young scholar, he followed his curiosity from electrical engineering to physics to pure mathematics, earning his Ph.D. at the age of 23 from the University of Michigan, and then landing teaching jobs at UC Berkeley, Columbia and Princeton.

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