Saturday, February 27, 2010

Life Imitates Math : NPR Interview with Steve Strogatz

In his new book, The Calculus of Friendship, math professor and writer Steven Strogatz looks back on his 30-year correspondence with his high school math teacher. Can calculus, differential equations and chaos theory help explain the complex nature of human relationships?  [READ MORE and listen to an interview on NPR...]

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=124115260&ft=2&f=510221

Strogatz is an applied mathematician who is a leader in contemporary interdisciplinary work on social networks and other structures found in the social and natural worlds.  We used his book, Sync, about how spontaneous order emerges out of chaos in my College 60, "Ants, Brains, Cities, and Software."  It explains, for example, how a big crowd can coordinate random clapping into a rhythmic clap-clap-clap even though the member of the audience have mostly local knowledge of the rhythm of nearby clappers.

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