Steven Henry Strogatz (/ˈstroʊɡæts/; born August 13, 1959) is an American mathematician and author, and the Susan and Barton Winokur Distinguished Professor for the Public Understanding of Science and Mathematics at Cornell University.

Strogatz completed his senior thesis, titled "The mathematics of supercoiled DNA: an essay in geometric biology", under the supervision of Frederick J. Almgren, Jr.[8] Strogatz then studied as a Marshall Scholar at Trinity College, Cambridge, from 1980 to 1982, and then received a Ph.D.[9] 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.

Several of these projects dealt with coupled oscillators, such as lasers, superconducting Josephson junctions, and crickets that chirp in unison.

[17][18] Perhaps his best-known research contribution is his 1998 Nature paper with Duncan Watts, entitled "Collective dynamics of small-world networks".

[19] This paper is widely regarded as a foundational contribution to the interdisciplinary field of complex networks, whose applications reach from graph theory and statistical physics to sociology, business, epidemiology, and neuroscience.

[35] Published in 2019, it "evocatively conveys how calculus illuminates the patterns of the Universe, large and small," according to a review in Nature.

[48] The award citation[49] describes the book as "a masterpiece of expository writing" and remarks that it is "directed to the millions of readers who claim they never really understood what the mathematics they studied was all about, for whom math was a series of techniques to be mastered for no apparent reason."