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| Steven H. Strogatz |
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| Professor of Theoretical and Applied Mechanics (T&AM) and Member of the Field of Mathematics |
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Web Site www.tam.cornell.edu/Strogatz.html Contact Information
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Education
Ph.D. (1986) Harvard University
Research Area: Applied Mathematics
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 parametric resonance in microelectromechanical systems (MEMS); the nonlinear dynamics of HIV interacting with the immune system; and mathematical explorations of the small-world phenomenon in social networks (popularly known as "six degrees of separation"). Currently, we have been studying a wide variety of complex networks in both the natural and social sciences, using ideas from graph theory, statistical physics, and nonlinear dynamics.
Selected Publications
Sync: The Emerging Science of Spontaneous Order, Hyperion, 2003.
Exploring complex networks, Nature 410 (2001), 268–276.
Collective dynamics of 'small-world' networks (with D. J. Watts), Nature 393 (1998), 440–442.
Synchronization transitions in a disordered Josephson series array (with P. Colet and Wiesenfeld), Physical Review Letters 76 (1996), 404–407.
Nonlinear Dynamics and Chaos: With Applications to Physics, Biology, Chemistry, and Engineering, Perseus Books, 1994.
Crowd synchrony on the Millennium Bridge (with D. M. Abrams, B. Eckhardt, A. McRobie, and E. Ott), Nature 438 (2005), 43–44.
Last modified: May 18, 2006