A mathematician whose name is attached to Hermite polynomials.

Diocles was a Greek mathematician associated with the cissoid of Diocles and the geometry of the parabola. The dates of his life are approximate.^[ref]

Biography: mathshistory.st-andrews.ac.uk/Biographies/Diocles/

Jeffrey Shallit studies combinatorics on words, formal languages, automata theory and algorithmic number theory. His work connects finite descriptions of sequences with arithmetic structure and algorithms for deciding properties of those sequences.

His personal page gives a useful caution about experimentation: an apparently valid linear recurrence for one integer sequence fails only at index 11056. Long numerical agreement can motivate a conjecture, but a mathematical proof needs a structural reason that the identity continues indefinitely.^[ref]

Steven H. Strogatz is an applied mathematician studying nonlinear dynamical systems. His research includes synchronization of oscillators: how interacting periodic units can develop coordinated rhythms, as in flashing fireflies or biological oscillations.^[ref] With Duncan J. Watts, he studied small-world networks, connecting strong local clustering with short paths across a network.^[ref]

Alan Turing developed a precise machine model of effective computation in On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem by Alan Turing. A Turing machine combines a finite set of control states with an unbounded tape and local read/write moves; this permits mathematical questions about what an algorithm can compute, rather than tying computation to one physical device. His universal-machine construction is foundational to computability theory.^[ref] His later The chemical basis of morphogenesis by Alan Turing connects reaction–diffusion systems with the formation of spatial patterns.

Martin Z. Bazant develops mathematical models of electrochemistry and transport phenomena, including interfacial reactions and ion transport in energy-storage and separation systems. His research combines analytic approximations, computation and experimental comparisons.

The scientific connection is between local transport or reaction laws and the collective behavior of a device. A model can explain how a change at an interface affects an observed current, while experimental data test whether the chosen assumptions capture the physical process.^[ref]

Mark Levi studies dynamical systems through geometry and analysis, with applications to mechanical and physical motion. His research description includes stability, geometric phases, averaging and charged-particle dynamics.

An example of the viewpoint is the inverted pendulum: a rapidly varying drive can stabilize a configuration that is unstable without it. Translating the motion into geometric or averaged descriptions can expose a simpler mechanism than direct inspection of the full trajectory.^[ref]

Peter Shor is a mathematician whose research includes quantum computing, quantum information theory, algorithms and computational geometry.^[ref] His quantum algorithms for integer factorization and discrete logarithms require a number of steps polynomial in the number of input digits. They made the distinction between classical and quantum computational resources concrete for problems used in cryptography.^[ref]

A. F. Bower is the author of Applied Mechanics of Solids by A. F. Bower, an online text whose title page gives his name as Allan F. Bower. The text connects elasticity, plasticity in continuum mechanics and fracture mechanics to explicit models of how solids deform. Its treatment of single-crystal plastic deformation follows slip systems and the rotation of the tensile axis, showing why a single crystal's response depends on its orientation.^[ref]

Jinn-Wen Hwang wrote the 1972 thesis Thermal expansion of nickel and iron, and the influence of nitrogen on the lattice parameter of iron at the Curie temperature by Jinn-Wen Hwang. Its X-ray diffraction measurements connect the lattice parameter of nickel and iron to temperature and the magnetic transition near the Curie temperature. The institutional record identifies it as a master's thesis in metallurgical engineering; no later biography is inferred from that credit.^[ref]

Walt Kester is an electrical engineer whose technical writing concerns data converters and sampled-data electronics. He edited The Data Conversion Handbook edited by Walt Kester, which brings together converter architectures, testing, interfacing and practical circuit design.^[ref]

A useful distinction in this subject is between signal sampling, which selects values at particular times, and quantization, which selects a representable numerical level. An analog-to-digital converter combines both. Kester's explanation of the Nyquist–Shannon sampling theorem connects the sampling rate with the frequencies present at the converter input, making filtering part of the measurement design.^[ref]

Technical publications: www.analog.com/en/resources/technical-books/data-conversion-handbook.html

Joe Sawada studies combinatorial generation: efficient ways to list all objects in a specified family. His author homepage highlights Gray codes, where consecutive objects differ by a small change, and De Bruijn sequences, which encode many short words through overlapping windows. These viewpoints make the order of generation part of an algorithm's design.^[ref]

Aaron Williams is a coauthor of A Hamilton Cycle in the k-Sided Pancake Network. The paper gives a Hamiltonian cycle through a directed graph of coloured permutations and four algorithms that traverse it. An edge reverses an initial segment and changes its colours modulo $k$. A single cycle therefore supplies a systematic generation order in which every coloured permutation appears once.^[ref]

Paolo Ferragina coauthored Opportunistic Data Structures with Applications by Paolo Ferragina and others, introducing a compressed text index associated with the FM-index. It supports searching without storing a separate uncompressed copy of the text. The construction connects the Burrows-Wheeler transform to string-searching algorithms, making the repeated structure used by data compression useful for queries as well.^[ref]

Josh Abramson is a first-listed author of Accurate structure prediction of biomolecular interactions with AlphaFold 3 by Josh Abramson and others. The work presents AlphaFold 3 for joint prediction of biomolecular structures involving proteins, DNA, RNA and small-molecule ligands. This extends protein structure prediction toward interactions between different molecular components; a predicted structure remains a model to compare with experimental evidence.^[ref]

Lov Grover introduced a quantum algorithm for an unstructured search problem that finds a marked item among $N$ possibilities with $O(\sqrt{N})$ queries. The algorithm repeatedly changes quantum phases so that the amplitude of a desired outcome grows. Its query complexity concerns access to the marking rule; the time needed to implement that rule still matters in an application.^[ref]

Gilles Brassard is a computer scientist whose work with Charles H. Bennett established an influential approach to quantum key distribution. Their 1984 protocol, now called BB84, encodes information in pure states represented by nonorthogonal vectors and uses classical communication to compare the preparation and measurement choices.^[ref]

The physical idea is that an observer who does not know the preparation basis cannot extract the encoded information without risking detectable disturbance. The protocol therefore uses sampled outcomes to assess the shared data. Its classical discussion must be authenticated: otherwise an active intermediary could impersonate each participant. This connects the physics of quantum measurement with assumptions about the surrounding cryptographic protocol.^[ref]

A surface-chemistry researcher whose work includes the colloidal probe technique for measuring forces with an atomic force microscope.

Homepage: surfaces.che.vt.edu/professor-william-ducker.html

Tristan M. McGinnis coauthored research on Friedel-Crafts acylation.^[ref]

Friedel-Crafts acylation attaches an acyl group to an aromatic carbon through electrophilic substitution. Lewis-acid activation of an acyl chloride is often represented by an acylium ion or strongly polarized contact pair.