Alongside the efforts to catalogue material properties, which have yielded vast databases, there is a line of research seeking the universal aspects and general mechanisms behind these properties. Researchers at MIT have now successfully used a mathematical framework described as ‘category theory’ to rigorously map the properties of different carbon nanostructures to 3D-printed macroscale prototypes. The success of the approach suggests it may be useful for gaining insights into the relative properties of other classes of materials………
http://nanotechweb.org/cws/article/tech/63412
