Rate My Professor Lai-Sang Young

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.