Princeton professor wins prestigious Tyler Prize for Environmental Achievement

Professor Simon Levin, explains his work aimed at understanding and, hopefully, preserving delicate environment.

What does math have to do with sea otters? More than you’d think.

Simon Levin, a Princeton professor who just won the 2014 Tyler Prize for Environmental Achievement is a mathematician by training, but he devotes his skills to understanding the intricate relationships between living things and the ecosystems they shape, from rivers to oceans to forests.

In recent decades, Levin has turned his focus to the relationship between ecology and economics.

“I’m convinced that one can’t solve environmental problems just doing biology, physics, and chemistry,” he says. “One has to understand these systems as coupled with the human systems that create stresses, that withdraw resources, that add pollutants to the system…that change the climate.”

He joined us to talk about his life’s work in his own words.