A.B. 1980 (Princeton)
B.A. 1982 and M.A. 1986 (Cambridge)
Ph.D. 1986 (Harvard)
After receiving his bachelor's degree in mathematics from Princeton in 1980, Strogatz spent two years as a Marshall Scholar at Trinity College, Cambridge. He did his doctoral work in applied mathematics at Harvard, and then stayed for three years as a National Science Foundation postdoctoral fellow. From 1989 to 1994, Strogatz taught in the Department of Mathematics at MIT. He has received numerous awards for his research, teaching, and public service, including: a Presidential Young Investigator Award from the National Science Foundation (1990); MIT's highest teaching prize, the E. M. Baker Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching (1991); the J.P. and Mary Barger '50 Teaching Award (1997), the Robert '55 and Vanne '57 Cowie Teaching Award (2001), and the Tau Beta Pi Teaching Award (2006), all from Cornell's College of Engineering; and the Communications Award from the Joint Policy Board for Mathematics (2007), a lifetime achievement award for the communication of mathematics to the general public. Strogatz joined the Cornell faculty in 1994. He is a member of the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics, and the Society for Mathematical Biology.
I have broad interests in applied mathematics. At the beginning of my career I was fascinated by mathematical biology and worked on a variety of problems, 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 1990's, my 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. I also love branching out into new areas, often with students taking the lead. In the past few years, this has led us into such topics as: mathematical explorations of the small-world phenomenon in social networks (popularly known as "six degrees of separation"), and its generalization to other complex networks in nature and technology; the nonlinear dynamics of language death; and the role of crowd synchronization in the wobbling of London’s Millennium Bridge on its opening day.
"Emergence" -- Radio Lab
"(So-Called) Life" -- Radio Lab
"Yellow Fluff and Other Curious Encounters" -- Radio Lab
"Scientists Debate 'Six Degrees of Separation'" -- Science Friday
"Who are You Connected To?" -- Morning Edition
Strogatz and TAM Alum, Duncan Watts, in Network Documentary
