Nonlinear thinker: Making sense of previously insoluble problems

From PhysOrg.com:

Pablo Parrilo, the Finmeccanica Career Development Professor at MIT’s Laboratory for Information and Decision Systems, has developed a new set of techniques that make it easier to get a handle on nonlinear systems. Moreover, in many cases, his techniques provide algorithms — step-by-step instructions — for analyzing those systems, taking away much of the guesswork. “The impact he’s had has been huge. Huge,” says Russ Tedrake, a robotics researcher at MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab. Tedrake has adapted Parrilo’s techniques to create novel control systems for walking and flying robots, and major engineering companies have used them in the design of aircraft and engines. Quantum information theorists have used them to describe the mysterious property known as entanglement — in which the states of subatomic particles become dependent on each other — and biologists have used them to make sense of the complicated chemical signaling pathways found in cells.

Full article

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