“Do you think every fingerprint is really unique?” It's a question a professor asked Gabe Guo during a casual conversation while they were stuck at home during a Covid-19 lockdown. Gabe Guo was waiting to start his freshman year at Columbia University.
"Little did I know that the conversation would set the scene for the focus of my life for the next three years," Guo said.
Guo, now an undergraduate senior in Columbia's computer science department, led a team that a study on the subject, with Professor Wenyao Xu of the University at Buffalo as one of its authors.
It was published this week in the journal Science Advances. Their study essentially overturns a long-accepted truth about fingerprints: Not all are unique, argue Guo and his colleagues.
In fact, scientific journals rejected the paper several times before the team appealed and it was finally accepted into Science Advances.
"There was a lot of backlash from the forensic community at first," recalls Guo, who had no background in criminology before the study.
“For the first or second iteration of our work, they said it is known that no two fingerprints are alike. I guess that really helped improve our study because we just kept putting more data into it, (increasing the precision) until finally the evidence was indisputable."
