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PROFESSOR: OK, why don't we you get started again? I can understand why there is an air of excitement in the room since tomorrow's a holiday. But we still got two hours before the day is over. Any questions on what we have done up to this point? No, that's good. Let me erase some of this art work then and ask why one would indulge in this rather bizarre exercise of taking the elements of something that represents a physical property and constructing a surface out of them. Well, the name suggests that maybe these surfaces, be they hyperboloids of one or two sheets or imaginary ellipsoids, have something to say about the property that the tensor that formed the coefficient of these functions is doing. So let me take the case of an ellipsoid. That would be the case where all the coefficients are positive. And let's let this be x1 and this x2. And let me ask a first question. If this is to be a well deserved function, does the surface transform in exactly the ...

PROFESSOR: Why don't we get started. Good afternoon-- to stretch the literal meaning of the word considerably. What a miserable day out there. I get to and from the boonies via the commuter rail. And this morning, we sat there for an hour part way in because a tree had fallen across the railroad track. I don't know who went out to do it, but somebody had to get a saw and saw the tree up and take it off the tracks before we could proceed into Boston. Even with that, I was sort of reluctant to get off the train. I saw how it was pouring outside. So I am highly flattered that you decided to trudge through the puddles and show up this afternoon. All right, this is a momentous occasion because we are exactly at this point, halfway through the term. And this is when we are about to change gears from our discussion of symmetry theory and switch over to physical properties of crystals and the way in which symmetry impacts on those properties. What I wanted to do primarily...

PROFESSOR: Why don't we go ahead and get started. Thank you very much for making the trek and the logistics to get all the way across campus. And I'm pleased to see that most of us made it back here. And if people straggle in, we'll understand. So this afternoon, we're going to shift from a technology focus to now research groups that are concentrating on specific business problems to solve. And our first speaker is Dr. Elgar Fleisch, who is the head of the eyed labs at the University of St. Gallen and ETH in Zurich, Switzerland. And he's here to share about the flagship project for the auto-ID labs in the anti-counterfeit space. ELGAR FLEISCH: Thank you very much. So I hope you don't suffer the same jet lag as I do. And I have the best position in this day to talk about any counterfeiting. So this is really the flagship project. We have not only one flagship project. Soon others will pop up. But this is a project which goes across all the labs-- o...