Ep. 108: Steven Strogatz

Talking Beats with Daniel Lelchuk

"I don't have one philosophy that covers every student-- I just try to push everybody's buttons and see what happens."

Mathematician Steven Strogatz is here. Known not just as a math professor to his students at Cornell University, he is a great explainer of math and why perhaps so many of us —from middle school, high school, and beyond — feel like math drops us and leaves us behind. Using some early disappointing math experiences to illustrate how curiosity and perseverance can prevail, Steven explains to Daniel how his passion for teaching and conveying what he calls “the beauty, the elegance, and the playfulness” of math drives him. He is also on the hunt for an elusive answer to a long-sought question….

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Steven Strogatz is the Jacob Gould Schurman Professor of Applied Mathematics at Cornell University. After graduating summa cum laude in mathematics from Princeton in 1980, Strogatz studied at Trinity College, Cambridge, where he was a Marshall Scholar. He 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. In the past few 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 dynamics of structural balance in social systems.

He is the author of Nonlinear Dynamics and Chaos (1994), Sync (2003), The Calculus of Friendship (2009), and The Joy of x (2012). His most recent book, Infinite Powers (2019), is a New York Times Best Seller.