Author: Damir Dzhafarov
Gearing up for UConn Gives!
Oleksii Mostovyi awarded NSF CAREER grant
Mathematics, Political Representation, and Gerrymandering
In Memoriam: Eugene Spiegel
We are saddened to report that our former colleague Eugene Spiegel passed away earlier this week.
Gene obtained his PhD from MIT in 1965. After a post-doc at Caltech he joined UConn in September 1967 as an Assistant Professor. Gene supervised six doctoral dissertations at UConn and, along with some other colleagues, built up the Mathematics Scholars Program. He served the department and the university for nearly four decades, including as Department Head from 1981 to 1986. He retired in July 2007.
Gene will be missed by family, friends, and all who came to know him.
UConn Hosting MathCounts Competition
On Saturday, February 9, the Department of Mathematics will host the Eastern Chapter of the MathCounts competition. For many years this competition took place at the Coast Guard Academy, but the recent government shutdown made it impossible. UConn came to rescue and hope to host up to 230 mathletes this week. One of the teams is from the Mansfield Middle School whose MathCounts club has been helped by Professors Gan, Gordina and Sidney for numerous years. The event will be organized with participation of three student chapters (AMS, AWM and SIAM).
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2019 Mathematics Distinguished Lecture: April 19 at 3:30pm
We are pleased to announce that Jill Pipher (Elisha Benjamin Andrews Professor of Mathematics at Brown University) will deliver the inaugural UConn Mathematics Distinguished Lecture on Friday, April 19th at 3:30pm in the Schenker Lecture Hall.
Mathematical ideas in public key cryptography
Jill Pipher
Elisha Benjamin Andrews Professor of Mathematics, Brown University
President, American Mathematical Society
The problem solved by public key encryption is this: how can we create secure communication over an insecure channel (like the internet) between two people who have never met or shared a secret? The model application, unknown at the time of its invention, is you and any of your online vendors.
The concept of public key encryption was introduced in the famous 1976 paper “New Directions in Cryptography” by Diffie and Hellman. At the time it was indeed a “solution in search of a problem”: the application of encryption and authentication on a mass scale had yet to emerge from the Arpanet. In that paper, Diffie and Hellman posed an extraordinarily challenging mathematical problem and laid the foundation for a new field of mathematics/computer science. Then, in 1978, Rivest, Shamir and Adelman produced the first published example of a public key cryptosystem; their RSA encryption is still widely used for secure communication.
This lecture will provide some historical background on the subject of private and public key, encryption and explain some of the ideas involved in several different encryption systems. Particular attention will be focused on lattiice-based encryption schemes such as NTRU, an efficient public key system due to Hoffstein, Pipher, and Silverman, first disseminated in1996, which continues to remain secure against the potential speed-ups of quantum computers. In the last couple of years, national agencies and large financial institutions have recognized the urgent need for post-quantum cryptography; NIST has initiated a process to solicit, evaluate, and standardize one or more quantum-resistant public-key cryptographic algorithms. We will indicate some of the applications of lattice-based cryptosystems like NTRU to post-quantum computing and to cloud computing on private data.