She’s right—using simultaneous equations does get really complicated, and if you’d like to send me your work for the solution, I’d love to see it. But the system is also kind of a trick. Like a sudoku ...

Frank Merle is used to confronting a messy world. He works on the mathematics of highly nonlinear systems—ones that respond in dramatic, unpredictable ways to even the smallest changes. It’s the same ...

Nonlinear functions defined over finite fields lie at the heart of modern algebraic design, with wide-ranging influence from cryptography to coding theory. Such functions depart from linear or affine ...