Credit: University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign Armando Collazo Garcia III got more than he expected from a graduate course he took last spring. He developed a new understanding of the physics of transonic shocks produced across a laminar flow airfoil with boundary-layer suction and added a published paper to his resume. "When I got the assignment to do a research project, I realized I already had a good data set from my master's thesis that I could use in a new way," Collazo Garcia said. "I was able to apply linear algebra techniques to manipulate the flow field data and decompose the information into modes. The modes provided a snapshot of various aspects of the flow and were ranked by their energy contribution, with the higher-ranking modes showing the most important characteristics of the flow. The beauty of this technique is it takes out all of the random noise--all of the uncertainty associated with the data--and identifies the modes that are most important so we can more efficiently study the process."