In 1990–1991, he did one year post-doctoral study in statistics under the guidance of Stephen Fienberg at Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh.
Lin has lectured globally and organized various large scale projects involving scholars from over 80 countries and geographic regions representing over 50 different scientific disciplines.
Since 2008, Lin has been editor of the book series, entitled “Systems Evaluation, Prediction and Decision-Making,” published by the CRC Press of Taylor and Francis Group.
Continuing his works on the chaos of general systems, starting in 1995, Lin joined hands with Shoucheng OuYang in establishing a theory about transitional changes naturally existing in evolutions of materials and events in the hope of producing more accurate forecasts for disastrous weather conditions.
[6] When Lin’s edited volume “Mystery of Nonlinearity and Lorenz’s Chaos” was published in 1998,[6] over one thousand correspondences from various scholars were received within the following year.
[12] With an invitation from Ronald Mickens in 1987, Lin, along with Wendell Holladay (Vanderbilt University), Saunders Mac Lane (University of Chicago), John Polkinghorne (Cambridge, UK), and others, expressed his opinions[13] from the angle of systems research on Nobel laureate Eugene P. Wigner’s assertion about “the unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics.” Continuing this work, Lin[14] (with a colleague) addressed the problem of knowability of the physical world in 1997.
Then in 2008 Lin guest edited a special volume of the international journal Kybernetes on the fourth crisis in the foundations of mathematics along with technical explanations on why the 2nd and the 3rd crises were not resolved as believed in history.
Yi Lin has published over three hundred research papers and over thirty monographs, and he has edited special topic volumes.