Illustration of British physicist Frederick Duncan Haldane (born 1951). In the 1980s Haldane was working with magnetic atomic chains. His work showed unexpected properties in these very thin materials that challenged previous quantum theories of matter. These phenomena could be described using topology, a branch of mathematics that describes properties that are preserved through stretching, twisting or other deformations, but not tearing. This work lead to Haldane receiving a share of the 2016 Nobel Prize in Physics, along with British physicists David Thouless and Michael Kosterlitz, for their theoretical discoveries of topological phase transitions and topological phases of matter. Their discoveries have applications in quantum computing and other electronics.