Steven Strogatz

Biosketch

Steven Strogatz is a professor of mathematics and the Susan and Barton Winokur Distinguished Professor for the Public Understanding of Science and Mathematics at Cornell University. He earned his BA in mathematics from Princeton University and was a Marshall Scholar at Trinity College, Cambridge. He then did his doctoral work in applied mathematics at Harvard, followed by an NSF postdoctoral fellowship in mathematical sciences at Harvard and Boston University. From 1989 to 1994, Strogatz taught in the Department of Mathematics at MIT. He joined the Cornell faculty in 1994. His honors include an NSF Presidential Young Investigator Award, MIT’s Everett Moore Baker Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching, the AAAS Public Engagement with Science Award, the Lewis Thomas Prize for Writing about Science, and a National Academies Eric and Wendy Schmidt Award for Excellence in Science Communications. Strogatz is a Fellow of the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Physical Society, the American Mathematical Society, and the Network Science Society. He is the author of Nonlinear Dynamics and Chaos, Sync, The Calculus of Friendship, The Joy of x, and most recently, Infinite Powers, which was a New York Times Bestseller and a finalist for the 2019 Royal Society Science Book Prize.

Research Interests

Prof. Strogatz is fascinated by nonlinear dynamics, and more broadly, by applications of mathematics in physics, biology, and social science. Early in his career, he worked on the geometry of supercoiled DNA, the dynamics of the human sleep-wake cycle, the topology of three-dimensional chemical waves, and the collective behavior of biological oscillators, such as swarms of synchronously flashing fireflies. In the 1990s, his work focused on nonlinear dynamics and chaos applied to physics, engineering, and biology. Several of these projects dealt with coupled oscillators, such as lasers, superconducting Josephson junctions, and crickets that chirp in unison. In each case, the research involved close collaborations with experimentalists. He also likes branching out into new areas, often with students taking the lead. Over the years, this has led him into such topics as the role of crowd synchronization in the wobbling of London’s Millennium Bridge on its opening day, and the implications of “the enemy of my enemy is my friend” for social networks and political systems. Perhaps his best-known research contribution is his 1998 Nature paper on "small-world" networks, co-authored with his former student Duncan Watts.