Rate My Professor Lai-Sang Young

Lai-Sang Young is the Henry & Lucy Moses Professor of Science, Silver Professor of Mathematics, and Professor of Mathematics and Neural Science at the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences, New York University. In the Department of Mathematics, she earned her B.A. in Mathematics from the University of Wisconsin in 1973, M.S. in Mathematics from the University of California, Berkeley in 1976, and Ph.D. in Mathematics from the University of California, Berkeley in 1978. Since 1999, she has held her positions at NYU, following prior appointments including at the University of California, Los Angeles.

Young's research specializes in dynamical systems, a branch of modern mathematics concerned with time evolutions of natural and iterative processes, with a particular emphasis on chaotic systems. Her work encompasses Lyapunov exponents, entropy, fractal dimensions, strange attractors, random perturbations, and rates of correlation decay. She investigates concrete models such as particle systems including billiards, kicked oscillators, large systems blending deterministic and stochastic elements, and systems out of equilibrium. More recently, her interests have extended to computational modeling and theoretical neuroscience, including emergent dynamics in models of the visual cortex and connections to probability and statistical physics. Key publications include "Statistical properties of dynamical systems with some hyperbolicity" in Annals of Mathematics (1998), "Toward a theory of rank one attractors" with Q.D. Wang in Annals of Mathematics (2008), and "Emergent dynamics in a model of visual cortex" with A. Rangan in Journal of Computational Neuroscience (2013). Young has received major awards such as the 2024 Rolf Schock Prize in Mathematics from the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences for her long-lasting and deep contributions to the theory of non-uniformly hyperbolic dynamical systems, the 2023 Heinz Hopf Prize from ETH Zürich, election to the National Academy of Sciences in 2020, and the 2021 Jürgen Moser Lecture prize. Her foundational contributions have profoundly shaped the understanding and applications of dynamical systems in mathematics.