Welcome to Applied Mathematics

Jun Liu, professor of applied mathematics and Canada Research Chair in Hybrid Systems and Control, has been elected Vice Chair of the SIAM Control and Systems Theory Activity Group. According to the SIAM website, the activity group fosters collaboration among mathematicians, engineers, and scientists working in systems and control, and promotes the development of theory and methods for modeling, estimation, control, and approximation of complex biological, physical, and engineering systems.

Professor Liu has also been elected Chair of the IEEE Control Systems Society Technical Committee on Hybrid Systems. According to the IEEE website, the committee provides forums for technical discussion and information sharing for researchers interested in hybrid systems and their applications. It organizes and supports conferences and educational events in the field, including the ACM International Conference on Hybrid Systems: Computation and Control, part of Cyber-Physical Systems Week, and the IFAC Conference on Analysis and Design of Hybrid Systems.

In a recent publication in the journal Physical Review Letters, Koji Yamaguchi, a former postdoctoral fellow, and Prof. Achim Kempf show how encrypted cloning of unknown quantum states can be achieved. As Kempf describes, “This breakthrough will enable quantum cloud storage, like a quantum Dropbox, a quantum Google Drive or a quantum STACKIT, that safely and securely stores the same quantum information on multiple servers, as a redundant and encrypted backup.”

Dr. José Polo-Gómez, a recent graduate of the Applied Mathematics PhD program, has received the 2026 Irwin Oppenheim Award from the American Physical Society. This award, which honours early-career scientists, recognizes Dr. Polo-Gómez for showing that the second law of thermodynamics limits the ability to distinguish between quantum states. He reported this result in a 2024 paper entitled “Thermodynamic bound on quantum state discrimination”. Dr. Polo-Gómez, who worked under the supervision of Professor Eduardo Martin-Martinez, is now a postdoctoral researcher at the Max Planck Institute of Quantum Optics.