Rothman received his A.B. in applied mathematics from
Brown University in 1979, before completing a PhD in geophysics at
Stanford University in 1986. Rothman then joined the faculty at MIT later that year. Since 1986, he has held visiting appointments at Harvard's Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study,
The University of Chicago, and
Ecole Normale Superieure. Rothman is a Fellow of the American Physical Society and the American Geophysical Union and is the recipient of the 2016 Levi L. Conant Prize from the American Mathematical Society. He is also co-founder and co-director of MIT's Lorenz Center with atmospheric scientist
Kerry Emanuel, an interdisciplinary research center devoted to learning how climate works with a particular interest in nonlinear dynamics. With Stiphane Zaleski, he is the co-author of
Lattice-Gas Cellular Automata: Simple Models of Complex Hydrodynamics. ==References==