Math Colloquium Kicks Off With Friendship And Fireflies
WILLIAMSTOWN, Mass. - Steven H. Strogatz, the Cornell mathematician known for studying the quirks of everyday life, will kick off the math colloquium at Williams College with two lectures. Both lectures are free and open to the public.His first talk, "The Calculus of Friendship," is scheduled for Tuesday, Sept. 15, at 8 p.m. in Wege Auditorium, Science Center. The second talk, "The Mathematics of Collective Synchronization," will be held Wednesday, Sept. 16, at 1 p.m., in Bronfman Auditorium.
In "The Calculus of Friendship," Strogatz will tell the story of his unusual 30-year correspondence with his high school math teacher, which he chronicled in his most recent book. The correspondence began after Strogatz finished high school, and it followed him through the slopes and shocks of life: college, graduate school, the sudden death of a parent, and a failed marriage. And yet the letters were always about math problems.
"Calculus is the mathematics of change, and in a metaphorical way, the book is about the same thing. It's about the transformation that takes place in a student's heart, as he and his teacher reverse roles, as they age, and as they get banged around by life," Strogatz told Inside Higher Ed.
In his second lecture, "The Mathematics of Collective Synchronization," Strogatz will talk about how swarms of male fireflies manage to flash on and off in perfect unison, without any leader or cue from the environment. He will introduce the Kuramoto model, the simplest mathematical model of collective synchronization.
Strogatz is the Jacob Gould Schurman Professor of Applied Mathematics at Cornell University. He has studied the math behind real-world phenomena, including love affairs, the human sleep-wake cycle, crickets' chirping, and the game "six degrees of separation."
He is the author of the books "The Calculus of Friendship: What a Teacher and a Student Learned about Life while Corresponding about Math" (2009) and "Sync: The Emerging Science of Spontaneous Order" (2003), and the textbook "Nonlinear Dynamics and Chaos" (2001). In addition, Strogatz was selected by The Teaching Company to record a series of lectures on chaos. He is well-known for his article Collective Dynamics of 'Small-World' Networks (1998), co-written with Duncan Watts, a sociologist at Columbia.
Before joining Cornell in 1994, Strogatz taught at MIT, where he received the school's highest teaching prize. At Cornell, he won the Communications Award from the Joint Policy Board for Mathematics (2007) for making math accessible to the general public.
Strogatz received his A.B. from Princeton and his PhD. in applied mathematics from Harvard.
