This event has finished.

Reddit Ask Me Anything: Prof. Steven Strogatz on applied mathematics

Join us for a Reddit AMA with eLife author Steven Strogatz to talk about how he applies mathematics to biology and physics, and communicates about maths to the public.

eLife is teaming up with Reddit Science to give you the opportunity to chat directly with Steven Strogatz about his research on January 15, 2018, at 1pm EST.

He will be answering questions about a recent paper his group published in eLife – where they used a simple mathematical model to discover why diverse infectious diseases and cancers show similar distributions in their incubation periods – or queries related to anything about mathematics and its applications more broadly.

  1. Join the AMA
Prof. Steven Strogatz.

Prof. Steven Strogatz I’m the Jacob Gould Schurman Professor of Applied Mathematics at Cornell University, New York. 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, and the collective behavior of biological oscillators, such as swarms of synchronously flashing fireflies. In the 1990s, 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 enjoy branching out into new areas, often with students taking the lead. In the past, this has led us into such topics as mathematical explorations of the small-world phenomenon in social networks (popularly known as “six degrees of separation”), and its generalization to other complex networks in nature and technology; 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.

During my AMA, I’ll be answering questions about a recent paper my group published in the journal eLife – where we used a simple mathematical model to discover why diverse infectious diseases and cancers show similar distributions in their incubation periods – or queries related to anything about mathematics and its applications more broadly.