NITMB Public Lecture featuring Steven Strogatz

Steven Strogatz is the Susan and Barton Winokur Distinguished Professor for the Public Understanding of Science and Mathematics at Cornell University. After graduating summa cum laude in mathematics from Princeton in 1980, Strogatz was a Marshall Scholar at Trinity College, Cambridge. He then did his doctoral work in applied mathematics at Harvard, followed by a National Science Foundation postdoctoral fellowship 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.         

Strogatz has broad research interests. Early in his career, he worked on a variety of problems in mathematical biology, including 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 and political systems.

Perhaps his best-known research contribution is his 1998 paper on "small-world" networks, co-authored with his former student Duncan Watts. It has now been cited more than 50,000 times, according to Google Scholar. As of 17 October 2014, it was the 63rd most highly cited research article of all time. 

Strogatz has received numerous awards for his research, teaching, and public communication, including: a Presidential Young Investigator Award from the National Science Foundation (1990); the Everett Moore Baker Memorial Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching (1991), the only teaching award at MIT in which the nomination and selection of the recipients is done entirely by the students; the AAAS Public Engagement with Science Award (2013), whose previous winners include Carl Sagan, Neil DeGrasse Tyson, and E.O. Wilson; the Lewis Thomas Prize for Writing about Science (2015), which honors "the scientist as poet" and whose previous awardees include Freeman Dyson, Oliver Sacks, and Atul Gawande; Cornell's highest teaching prize, the Stephen H. Weiss Presidential Fellowship (2016); and a National Academies Eric and Wendy Schmidt Award for Excellence in Science Communications (2023).

In 2024, Strogatz was elected to the National Academy of Sciences. He is also a Fellow of the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (2009), the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (2012), the American Physical Society (2014), the American Mathematical Society (2016), and the Network Science Society (2018).

He has spoken at TED, the Aspen Ideas Festival, and the World Government Summit, and he is a frequent guest on Radiolab and Science Friday. In the spring of 2010, he wrote The Elements of Math, a weekly blog about mathematics for The New York Times; the Harvard Business Review described these columns as “a model for how mathematics needs to be popularized." His second New York Times series, Me, Myself and Math, appeared in the fall of 2012. Strogatz also filmed a series of 24 lectures on Chaos for the Teaching Company’s Great Courses series. In 2020 and 2021, he hosted a podcast for Quanta Magazine called The Joy of x, in which he interviewed some of the world’s leading scientists and mathematicians. In 2022 Strogatz began hosting a new podcast for Quanta called The Joy of Why, which explores some of the biggest unanswered questions in math and science today. His media appearances include the Emmy-winning 2022 Netflix documentary A Trip to Infinity, about which Decider.com wrote: “Performance Worth Watching: Mathematician Steven Strogatz gives off some serious lovable-high-school-physics-teacher vibes: He speaks in an upbeat tone that infects you with his sense of awe and wonder for the natural world.”

Strogatz is the author of  (1994),  (2003),  (2009), and  (2012). His most recent book, (2019), was a New York Times Best Seller and was shortlisted for the 2019 Royal Society Science Book Prize.

Info: Tickets to the lecture are required for the book signing. Books The Joy of X (2012), and Infinite Powers (2019) will be made available for purchase.

Host or Publisher NITMB