He joined the Sciences Faculty of UNAM, he obtained his Master degree at the CINVESTAV and his PhD degree at Oxford University. Subsequently he conducted a postdoctoral stay of two years at the University of Iliinois at Urbana, where he became interested in complex systems. Rejecting opportunities to stay in the United States, he returned to Mexico and joined the Complex Systems Group at the Physics Institute. As a family tradition Jorge was interested in seismology, field where he perceived an opportunity to make important contributions. The seismology differed from other applied physics disciplines due to the fact that the focus of an earthquake its inaccessible to direct observation because it is found at a depth that man has not yet achieved. The estimate of earthquake risk was based on the assumption that tremors were independent events lacked of correlation between them. However, fifteen years ago scientists began to suspect that the fault system that produced the tremor was self-organised, in the same way as hydrological systems of rivers and tributaries.
Jorge Lomnitz put his talent, enthusiasm and ingenuity to serve this new hypothesis. He built ingenious mathematical and computational models to explore the properties of recurrence of large earthquakes. Lomnitz used a carefully planned strategy. First he differentiated the formal mathematics relations between the variables that govern the seismic process in the time domain, leading to a master equation between the state of failure before and after a break. He used these results to design a computer experiment, based on the concept of cellular automata that von Neuman originate. Jorge showed that there were two types of tremors, small ones that were originated by the breakdown of just two or three cells, and the big ones who break the whole available set of the cell matrix.
These works were conducted and published jointly with members of his group at the Institute and his students. Subsequently, in a six-month stay in Los Angeles, Jorge worked with scientists at the University of California and published an important joint work with the participation of members of his group. At this point, he turned his increasingly interest on the crucial problem of friction, a problem that unfortunately did not had time to resolve.
The intellectual adventure star in by George Lomnitz go beyond the current state of geophysics progress. When he met with limited data availability, he decided to study a similar tremors system that makes it more accessible for experimentation. This is how he decided to study avalanches. Together with his colleagues from the Institute of Physics, Lomnitz built a rotating drum filled with sand which let the directly studying of a complex system behaviour. The results obtained by Lomnitz are fertile and enigmatic and its relevance for the earthquake's study has not been fully exploited yet.
The prize that bears his name is intended to perpetuate the concerns of one of the most passionate scientific personalities that has produced mexican physics. The successful combination of imagination, elegance and rigor that characterizes the Jorge Lomnitz work serve as a stimulus to future generations of scientists that he will help to train.
The "George Lomnitz Adler" Prize in nonlinear dynamics, was established in 1996, by common agreement of the Institute of Physics of the UNAM and the Mexican Academy of Sciences in order to distinguish the contributions of notable national scientists to the modern field of Non-Linear Dynamic. The award is given annually and consists of a diploma and a monetary contribution.
