Xzavier Herbert, a bright star in space math

Sophomore math major Xzavier Herbert was never much into science fiction or the space program, but his skills in pure mathematics seem to keep drawing him into NASA’s orbit. With an interest in representation the­ory, Herbert spent the summer virtually at NASA, studying con­nections between clas­sical information theory and quantum informa­tion theory, each of which cor­responds to a different set of laws: classical physics and quantum mechanics. “What I’m doing in­volves how represen­tation theory allows us to draw a direct analog from classical informa­tion theory to quantum information theory,” Herbert…