Jill C. Pipher, Vice President for Research and Elisha Benjamin Andrews Professor of Mathematics at Brown University will give the Stelson Lecture at Georgia Tech on March 1, 2018, 6:00-7:00 PM • Klaus Lecture Auditorium 1443, with a reception to follow at 7:00 PM.

See also the CoS story here:

http://www.cos.gatech.edu/hg/item/602067

Abstract for Stelson Lecture

How is it possible to send encrypted information across an insecure channel (like the internet) so that only the intended recipient can decode it, without sharing the secret key in advance? In 1976, well before this question arose, a new mathematical theory of encryption (public-key cryptography) was invented by Diffie and Hellman, which made digital commerce and finance possible. The technology advances of the last twenty years bring new and urgent problems, including the need to compute on encrypted data in the cloud and to have cryptography that can withstand the speed-ups of quantum computers. In this lecture, we will discuss some of the history of cryptography, as well as some of the latest ideas in "lattice" cryptography which appear to be quantum resistant and efficient 

There will also be a Colloquium on Friday, March 2, 2018, at 11:00 AM in Skiles room 006.

Title: Non-smooth boundary value problems

The regularity properties of solutions to linear partial differential equations in domains depend on the structure of the equation, the degree of smoothness of the coefficients of the equation, and the boundary of the domain. Quantifying this dependence is a classical problem, and modern techniques can answer some of these questions with remarkable precision. For both physical and theoretical reasons, it is important to consider partial differential equations with non-smooth coefficients. We’ll discuss how some classical tools in harmonic and complex analysis have played a central role in answering questions in this subject at the interface of harmonic analysis and partial differential equations. 

About the speaker:

Jill Pipher is the Elisha Benjamin Andrews Professor Mathematics at Brown University. She received her Ph.D. from the University of California, Los Angeles. She is the president-elect of the American Mathematical Society and she was the first director of the Institute for Computational and Experimental Research. She taught at the University of Chicago before taking a position at Brown, where she served as chair of the Mathematics Department from 2005 to 2008. Her work has been in harmonic analysis, Fourier analysis, partial differential equations, and cryptography. She has published more than 50 research articles and has coauthored a textbook on cryptography.