News by Subject Mathematics

Mathematicians have opened a new chapter in the theory of moonshine, one which begins to harness the power of the pariahs -- sporadic simple groups that previously had no known application.

Nature Communications today published research by a team comprising Scottish and South African researchers, demonstrating entanglement swapping and teleportation of orbital angular momentum 'patterns' of light. This is a crucial step towards realizing a quantum repeater for high-dimensional entangled states.

MSU biometric expert Anil Jain and doctoral student Joshua Engelsma have for the first time designed and created a fake finger containing multiple key properties of human skin. Commonly called a spoof, this fake finger has been used to test two of the predominant types of fingerprint readers to help determine their resilience to spoof attacks.

When a fluid or a gas experiences a sudden disturbance, it often gives rise to a phenomenon known as an undular bore, which consists of a series of rapid oscillations that propagate and spread. But how to describe what transpires? New mathematics research brings us closer to finding an answer.

Categorizing species can get hazy at small, microbial scales. After all, the classical definition of species as interbreeding individuals with sexually viable offspring doesn't apply to asexual organisms. Examining shared DNA doesn't help either: collectively, E. coli bacteria have only 20 percent of genes in common. In new research, a Harvard researcher asks: could organism interactions be described without mentioning species at all?