Professor's research on causality, from firearms to fish makes cover of prestigious journal
Mathematicians use pictorial approaches to answer such cause-and-effect questions as, do media stories on firearm legislation influence gun sales? Maurizio Porfiri, professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering and collaborators at the Technical University of Cartagena, Spain, wrestled mathematical theory into quantifiable colorful maps called symbolic recurrence plots, proving the method’s validity. Their research is the cover story in the November issue of the American Institute of Physics journal Chaos.