Desiderio Vasquez of the Department of Physics at IPFW, has done something no other professor on campus has managed to do: have a second article accepted for publication in the prestigious Physical Review Letters. Vasquez’ article concerning the relaxation of a key restriction for the existence of Turing patterns was published in the Sept. 3 issue. Alan Turing, a noted British mathematician and cryptographer who died more than 50 years ago, worked on breaking German codes, most notably on the Enigma machine. After the war, he was one of the first to design programmable digital computers. Turing also predicted the formation of patterns in chemical systems, specifically a mechanism by which biological organisms will take form. In his mechanism, two chemicals, one an activator, the other an inhibitor, were used. The restriction was that the inhibitor had to diffuse faster than the activator. Vasquez has found that the conditions can be reversed in a moving fluid; that is, the activator can diffuse faster than the inhibitor. However, he says the flow has to be of a certain type that can be achieved in a cylindrical tube. Since making his theoretical prediction, Vasquez says experiments are being designed to test his prediction.

Editor’s note: The late Jon Barwise of the IUB Department of Philosophy also had an interest in Turing and his work. Readers may be interested in accessing this 1997 HP archival story about Barwise and his work at this Web address:
http://www.iuinfo.indiana.edu/homepages/1114/text/barwise.htm