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Cryptographer Boaz Barak yesterday was named as one of the Packard Foundation’s fellows in science and engineering. The much coveted fellowships give researchers $625,000 over five years — and the freedom to push the edge of scientific inquiry unfettered by funding restrictions.

A former postdoctoral researcher for Avi Wigderson at the Institute for Advanced Study, Barak works at the intersection of mathematics and computer science. Although he is an assistant professor of computer science at Princeton, Barak tells Kitta MacPherson of the Star-Ledger that he doesn’t use computers in his theoretical work — he works out his ideas with pen and paper.

While surely his work will have implications for securing the transmission of data over the Internet, Barak’s research is more fundamental. “I’m not asking what can we build that will not be broken today,” Barak, a native of Israel, tells MacPherson. “What we are looking at is what can we prove that’s simply impossible to break within, say, the computing resources that exist in the universe.”

Barak has written a forthcoming book with Sanjeev Arora on computational complexity theory, a draft of which can be downloaded (note: this will not be a breezy read for the mathematically phobic, who may prefer to check out the blog discussion and readings for the reputedly mind-blowing class for non-majors that Arora taught last year on the computational universe).

By the way, Arora was a Packard fellow in 1997. Other former Packard fellows among Princeton Engineering faculty are Stephen Chou, Yannis Kevrekidis, and Kyle Vanderlick.

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This week in Nature Materials, Princeton researchers from MIRTHE report that they have created a new type of “metamaterial” that has the rare ability to bend light in the opposite direction from all naturally occurring materials.

Metamaterials are an exotic new class of materials that, according to Kevin Bullis of Technology Review, “could be used to make flat and distortion-free lenses, powerful microscopes, and even cloaking devices that make objects invisible.”

The problem with metamaterials thus far, however, has been that they haven’t proved suitable for practical applications. But Bullis says that the Princeton metamaterials are higher performing and easier to manufacture, “perhaps bringing these applications closer to reality.”

“It’s quite an important step,” Igor Smolyaninov, a research scientist at the University of Maryland who works with metamaterials, tells Technology Review. “It’s much less expensive than anything else that people are doing.”

You can read the full Technology Review piece here. The Princeton metamaterials story is also getting seriously dug on Digg.

Computer simulation courtesy Anthony Hoffman

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The Princeton Urban Grand Challenge team has arrived in Victorville, Calif., just in time for today’s opening ceremonies.

The Princeton team is the only undergraduate team among the 35 semifinalists in the event, which promises $3.5 million in prize money. Most teams participating in the qualification event have serious financial and technical support from industry sponsors. By contrast, the Princeton team has been operating on a shoestring budget; its main resources have been spunk, enthusiasm and brainpower.

You can catch up on their exploits by reading some recent coverage by Humphrey Cheung of Tgdaily and Kevin Coughlin of the Star-Ledger. For more on the technology driving the car, see this post on ditii.com. And Collegotr.com offers a novel funding idea for Princeton’s team of “baby Einsteins.”

You can see the full team roster here (trading cards not yet available). And be sure to follow Princeton’s progress in the competition by reading the team blog.

More photos below, from a send-off ceremony last week in Princeton: Team members peer inside the Princeton vehicle; Dean H. Vincent Poor (center) offers his benediction to faculty adviser Alain Kornhauser and team; a film crew interviews one of the Princeton team members.

Photos by Frank Wojciechowski

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