Discover the Best Books Written by Steven Strogatz

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. Over the years, this has led him to 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. 

Perhaps his best-known research contribution is his 1998 Nature 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); 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), the Tau Beta Pi Teaching Award (2006), and the Swanson Teaching Award (2009), all from Cornell's College of Engineering; the Communications Award from the Joint Policy Board for Mathematics (2007), a lifetime achievement award for the communication of mathematics to the general public; 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 the SIAM George Pólya Prize for Mathematical Exposition (2019). 

Strogatz is a Fellow of the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (2009), the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (2012), the American Physical Society (2014), and the American Mathematical Society (2016).

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 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 he 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.

Strogatz 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), was a New York Times Best Seller and was shortlisted for the 2019 Royal Society Science Book Prize.