Scheme illustration of object identification and all-optical 3D reconstruction system. (a) A contour surface image of the object can be obtained in a single processing of the system. (b) High-contrast ...

When most people think of shapes, they imagine a triangle, a rectangle, or maybe even a fancier-sounding rhombus or trapezoid. But to mathematicians, shapes encompass a vast universe of surprising ...

The central objects of study in topology are spaces called manifolds, which look flat when you zoom in on them. The surface of a sphere, for instance, is a two-dimensional manifold. Topologists ...