ITHACA, N.Y. -- A $2,245,997 grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF) will provide fellowships for 12 Cornell graduate students each year over the next five years in a new interdisciplinary program on nonlinear systems. The first students will enroll in the fall of 1999.
Steven Strogatz, Cornell professor of theoretical and applied mechanics, is the principal investigator for the program, but the students will pursue doctorates in a wide variety of disciplines tied together by the fact that all involve the same type of mathematical analysis. At least 40 faculty members will be involved, ranging over four Cornell colleges and several other institutions.
The students will pursue degrees in fields as diverse as manufacturing, neuroscience, epidemiology and even finance. In addition to completing the Ph.D. requirements in their respective fields they will take minors in other fields, come together for a special course in the mathematics of nonlinear systems, attend weekly colloquia and seminars and complete a summer internship in a laboratory, hospital, Wall Street firm or industrial setting. The generous fellowships are designed to reduce the students' work loads as teaching and research assistants to allow more time for the additional work.
"It's really because we believe that this is how important advances are made, from some of these fields fertilizing each other," Strogatz said. He points out that the strategy of treating AIDS patients with a "cocktail" of three drugs was based on a nonlinear mathematical model developed out of cooperation between a clinical AIDS researcher and a theoretician. "Our dream is to train a new generation of students to have the language skills, the scientific background and the mathematical techniques needed to make similar advances in the future," he said. "I think Cornell gives us a big advantage because the overall structure allows some of that interaction," he added.
A "nonlinear" system in mathematics is one in which various parts must interact in some way with one another. As a result, you can't calculate what each part does separately and then add up the results to see what the whole system will do. You can't, for example, just add up the effects of three AIDS drugs on the human immune system, because the drugs interact with each other as well as with the virus.
Interest in nonlinear systems has grown rapidly over the last few decades, partly because computers have made it possible to create simulations of them by constantly recalculating the various parts of the system as one brings about changes in another.
Some other nonlinear systems that students in the program may study are the electrical signals that maintain the rhythm of the heart; the cutting, forming and casting of machine parts; the behavior of derivatives in the stock market; and the actions of natural disasters such as floods, earthquakes and landslides.
Departments at Cornell participating in the program include aerospace engineering, agricultural and biological engineering, applied and engineering physics, biometry, chemical engineering, economics, electrical engineering, geological sciences, management, mathematics, mechanical engineering, neurobiology and behavior, operations research and industrial engineering, physics, physiology, and theoretical and applied mechanics.
Joining them are scientists, engineers and business scholars from Morgan Stanley, SUNY Health Sciences Center, Los Alamos National Laboratory, Georgia Institute of Technology, Hewlett-Packard and the Boyce Thompson Institute for Plant Research at Cornell.
The grant to Cornell is part of NSF's Integrative Graduate Education and Research Traineeship (IGERT) program, intended to train a diverse group of scientists and engineers to take advantage of a broad spectrum of career options. A total of 17 doctorate-granting institutions are involved.
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