Colloquium October 23
Date: Friday, October 23
Time: 16:00 to 17:00
Place: 455 McBryde (Commons Room)
Speaker: Ezra Brown of the Math Dept
Title: Public Key Cryptography from Judges to Elliptic Curves
Abstract: The art and science of secure communication is called cryptography. To send someone a secret message, you need two things:
(1) a message scrambler or cryptosystem, and
(2) a piece of information
(the key) that tells the sender and the receiver just how the scrambling
is done.
Keeping the key in the right hands and out of the wrong hands is a major problem for cryptographers. One solution dating from the mid-1970s is called public key cryptography (PKC), and it is at work on every computer and in every network in the world. This talk is about the early history of PKC and about some of the mathematics -- mainly number theory and ellipticcurves -- that provides its security. There will be two hands-on demonstrations, one of which includes those little chocolate candies that come in various colors.
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