Already as a child, Kandrup was an accomplished musician, playing the organ, piano and French horn. He was also a passionate devotee of opera and ballet.
Scientific contributions
Kandrup's work led to greater understanding in the fields of stellar dynamics, chaos, and plasma physics. Much of Kandrup's research was directed toward developing a more refined mathematical description of dynamical relaxation in stellar systems. In a series of papers from the early 1990s, Henry developed the idea of chaotic phase mixing, the process by which an ensemble of points evolves toward a uniform coarse-grained population of phase space.[2][3]
Among his other contributions were a demonstration of the equivalence of Landau damping and phase mixing; a proof (with J. F. Sygnet) of the linear stability of a broad class of stellar systems;[4] and a generalization of Jeans's theorem to non-integrable systems.[5] At the time of his death, he was investigating the chaotic dynamics of charged particle beams, and the influence of binary supermassive black holes on the motion of stars in galaxies.[6]
Kandrup organized more than a dozen workshops on nonlinear dynamics at the University of Florida.[7]
^Kandrup, H. E.; Sygnet, J. F. (November 1985), "A simple proof of dynamical stability for a class of spherical clusters", The Astrophysical Journal, 298 (1): 27–33, Bibcode:1985ApJ...298...27K, doi:10.1086/163586
Gottesman, Stephen T.; Buchler, J.-R.; Mahon, M. E., eds. (2005). Nonlinear Dynamics in Astronomy and Physics: In Memory of Henry Kandrup. Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences. Wiley Blackwell. ISBN978-1573315913. Proceedings of the 16th Florida Workshop in Nonlinear Astronomy and Physics.