Cornell, Ithaca: In and around the summer of 1962, I visited Cornell University where my uncle had just received his PhD in physics and was moving off campus to become a high school teacher and to develop a nursery and garden center. Uncle Steve was entirely influential in my life, but years later another Steve at Cornell would push me perhaps a bit like E.P. Wigner had in my student days. Strogatz made mathematics come alive. One might say, “If it didn’t have a working mathematics, it didn’t really exist.”

The work of Professor Dr. Steven Strogatz was so helpful, I began a page just to have a place to link to those articles that influenced me most. The first such article was Why Pi Matters. Not too long thereafter, I included my notes, emails, tweets and other communications just so I wouldn’t make too big a nuisance of myself and I could pick up a thread of thought from where I left off.

This original page for those notes will now be used to go a little deeper. A case in point is his five-page document: Newton on infinite series and the Epistola Posterior. That’s the next focus.

Also, I’ll try to check a little more often in case any link happens to break. The substance of the Strogatz analysis is a key, very important to my personal growth and that of this website. He carries on the work of E.P. Wigner (author, The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences) yet he is taking Wigner’s spirit much further.

There’s so much more to come…

---

Watanable and Strogatz, 1994

Kassabov, Strogatz, Townsend, 2021

The Kuramoto model of coupled oscillators with a bi-harmonic coupling function

_____