After receiving his bachelor's degree, Strogatz spent two years as a Marshall Scholar at Cambridge University. 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 awards for both his teaching and his research, including MIT's highest teaching prize, the E. M. Baker Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching, and a Presidential Young Investigator Award from the National Science Foundation. 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 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. If you are interested in interdisciplinary graduate work in nonlinear science and complex systems, please look into our Nonlinear Systems Program ( face=Arial color=#0000ff http://www.chaos.cornell.edu/IGERT.html), sponsored by an NSF IGERT grant.
Current Research Projects
- Nonlinear Dynamics of Oscillator Networks (National Science Foundation)
Complex Interactive Networks (Electric Power Research Institute/Army Research Office)
- Worcel, A., Strogatz, S.H., Riley, D. 1981. Structure of chromatin and the linking number of DNA. Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. USA. vol. 78, No. 3 : 1461-1465. ( face=Arial color=#0000ff PDF, 3.1MB)
- Winfree, A. T., and S. H. Strogatz. 1984. Organizing centres for three-dimensional chemical waves. Nature 311:611-15. ( face=Arial color=#0000ff PDF, 10.3MB)
- Strogatz, S. H. 1986. The mathematical structure of the human sleep-wake cycle. Lecture Notes in Biomathematics, vol. 69. New York: Springer-Verlag.
- Strogatz, S. H. 1988. Love affairs and differential equations. Mathematics Magazine 61:35. ( face=Arial color=#0000ff PDF, 324KB)
- Mirollo, R.E., and Strogatz, S.H. 1990. Synchronization of pulse-coupled biological oscillators. SIAM J. Appl. Math. 50: 1645-1662. ( face=Arial color=#0000ff PDF, 4.1MB)
- Cuomo, K. M., A. V. Oppenheim, and S. H. Strogatz. 1993. Synchronization of Lorenz-based chaotic circuits, with applications to communications. IEEE Transactions on Circuits and Systems-II: Analog and Digital Signal Processing 40:626-33.
- Strogatz, S. H., and I. Stewart. 1993. Coupled oscillators and biological synchronization. Scientific American 269 (6):102-09. ( face=Arial color=#0000ff PDF, 15.0MB)
- Strogatz, S. H. 1994. Nonlinear dynamics and chaos: With applications to physics, biology, chemistry, and engineering. Reading, MA: Perseus Books, Cambridge MA. ( face=Arial color=#0000ff Publisher s Site) ( face=Arial color=#0000ff Buy at Amazon.com)
- Wiesenfeld, K., P. Colet, and S.H. Strogatz. 1996. Synchronization transitions in a disordered Josephson series array . Physical Review Letters 76:404-407.
- Watts, D. J. and S. H. Strogatz. 1998. Collective dynamics of 'small-world' networks. Nature 393:440-42. ( face=Arial color=#0000ff PDF, 273KB)
- Strogatz, S.H. 2001. Exploring complex networks. Nature 410: 268-276. ( face=Arial color=#0000ff PDF, 588KB)
- Strogatz, S. 2003. Sync: The Emerging Science of Spontaneous Order. New York: Hyperion. ( face=Arial color=#0000ff Buy at Amazon.com)
Last revised: 11/15/01
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