Steven Strogatz Lectures on Youtube

Nonlinear Dynamics and Chaos.

Previously (here, here, and here), I’ve written about Steven Strogatz, Professor of Applied Mathematics at Cornell University. Strogatz wrote one of my favorite textbooks: Nonlinear Dynamics and Chaos. Russ Hobbie and I cite it in Chapter 10 of Intermediate Physics for Medicine and Biology.

Nowadays students rarely read textbooks; they prefer watching videos. Well, I have good news. Strogatz taught a course based on his book, and his lectures are posted on YouTube. You can learn chaos straight from the horse’s mouth. You better get started: there are over 24 hours of video (all embedded below).

The 2nd Edition of Nonlinear Dynamics and Chaos.

Strogatz is an enormously successful mathematician. According to Google Scholar, his 1998 article with Duncan Watts—“Collective Dynamics of ‘Small-World’ Networks” (Nature, Volume 393, Pages 440-442)—has been cited over 35,000 times! His textbook has over ten thousand citations. (To put this in perspective, IPMB has 392.) He won the Lewis Thomas Prize for Writing about Science, tweets at @stevenstrogatz, and is buddies with M*A*S*H star and science communicator Alan Alda. In IPMB, Russ and I cite the first edition of Nonlinear Dynamics and Chaos, but Strogatz published a second edition in 2015.

Enjoy!

 

1. Introduction and Overview

2. One Dimensional Systems

3. Overdamped Bead on a Rotating Hoop

4. Model of Insect Outbreak

5. Two Dimensional Nonlinear Systems

6. Two Dimensional Nonlinear Systems Fixed Points

7. Conservative Systems

8. Index Theory and Introduction to Limit Cycles

9. Testing for Closed Orbits

10. Van der Pol Oscillator

11. Averaging Theory for Weakly Nonlinear Oscillators

12. Bifurcations in Two Dimensional Systems

13. Hopf Bifurcations in Aeroelastic Instabilities and Chemical Oscillators

14. Global Bifurcations of Cycles

 15. Chaotic Waterwheel

16. Waterwheel Equations and Lorenz Equations

17. Chaos in the Lorenz Equations

18. Strange Attractor for the Lorenz Equations

19. One Dimensional Maps

20. Universal Aspects of Period Doubling

21. Feigenbaum’s Renormalization Analysis of Period Doubling

22. Renormalization: Function Space and a Hands-on Calculation

23. Fractals and the Geometry of Strange Attractors

24. Henon Map

25. Using Chaos to Send Secret Messages