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By MARK SCHOOFS

Random-matrix theory is a mathematical method for finding hidden correlations within masses of data. It doesn't just find pairs, a relatively easy task, but can detect groups of many correlated units and even groups that change over time, adding and losing members. The theory was developed in the middle of the 20th century by Nobel laureate Eugene Wigner and others to address problems in nuclear physics. In the 1990s and early 2000s, physicists applied it to the stock market. A major event such as a severe recession will act on almost all stocks together, a correlation so broad it has little use. At the other extreme are millions of random correlationsstocks rising or falling together purely by chance. But some stocks, such as those of car companies and parts makers, act in true correlation. Sure enough, random-matrix theory filtered out the "noise" of random correlations and overwhelming events to reveal such genuine correlations. One of the authors of that finding, physicist Parameswaran Gopikrishnan, working with Boston University physics professor H. Eugene Stanley, is now a managing director at Goldman Sachs Group Inc. "Of course," Dr. Stanley said, "we know those sectors are correlated anyway." But his team found the sectors purely by using random-matrix theory "without looking at the innards of the companies," he explained. That proved the power of the theory, which Dr. Stanley believes could act as an early-warning system for stock-market analysts. If one company in a sector "wanders away and stops being correlated, that would tell you something is going on" in that firm. Arup Chakraborty, a chemistry and chemical engineering professor at MIT, knew of randommatrix theory from the stock market work and from a scientific colleague who had used it to analyze enzymes, though not in HIV. Dr. Chakraborty thought it could help find sectors of HIV that rarely undergo multiple mutationsand it did.
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