Steven H Strogatz - How things in nature tend to sync up -TED

Description: Mathematician Steven Strogatz shows how flocks of creatures (like birds, fireflies and fish) manage to synchronize and act as a unit - when no one's giving orders. The powerful tendency extends into the realm of objects, too.

Steven H. Strogatz (born August 13, 1959) is an American mathematician and the Jacob Gould Schurman Professor of Applied Mathematics at Cornell University. He is known for his contributions to the study of synchronization in dynamical systems, and for his work in a variety of areas of applied mathematics, including mathematical biology and complex network theory.

In particular, his 1998 Nature paper with Duncan Watts, entitled "Collective dynamics of small-world networks", is widely regarded as a seminal contribution to the new interdisciplinary field of "complex networks," whose applications reach from graph theory and statistical physics to sociology, business, epidemiology, and neuroscience. As one measure of this paper's impact, it is the most highly cited article about networks in the past decade, according to the ISI Web of Science. It was also the sixth most highly cited paper in physics, with 2700 citations, between January 1, 1998 and August 31, 2008

Strogatz's books include the textbook Nonlinear Dynamics and Chaos and the trade book Sync, chosen as a Best Book of 2003 by Discover Magazine. He filmed a series of lectures on chaos theory for the Teaching Company, released in 2008

Strogatz attended the Loomis Chaffee School (1972-1976) and graduated summa cum laude with an A.B. in mathematics from Princeton University in 1980. He was a Marshall Scholar at Trinity College, Cambridge from 1980-1982, and then received a PhD in applied mathematics from Harvard University in 1986 for his research on the dynamics of the human sleep-wake cycle. After spending three years as a National Science Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow at Harvard and Boston University, Strogatz joined the faculty of the Department of Mathematics at MIT in 1989. His research on dynamical systems was recognized with a Presidential Young Investigator Award from the National Science Foundation in 1990. In 1994 he moved to Cornell where he is the Jacob Gould Schurman Professor of Applied Mathematics, as well as a Professor of Theoretical and Applied Mechanics and the current Director of the Center for Applied Mathematics.

Strogatz has been lauded for his ability as a teacher and communicator. In 1991 he was honored with the E.M. Baker Memorial Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching, MIT's only institute-wide teaching award selected and awarded solely by students. He has also won several teaching awards from Cornell's College of Engineering, including the Tau Beta Pi Excellence in Teaching Award (2006), given to a faculty member selected by engineering students for exemplary teaching. At the national level, Strogatz received the JPBM Communications Award in 2007. Presented annually, this award recognizes outstanding achievement in communicating about mathematics to nonmathematicians. The JPBM represents the American Mathematical Society, the American Statistical Association, the Mathematical Association of America, and the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics.

SOURCE: WIKIPEDIA (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steven_Strogatz)