WIMIN '09
A one-day conference in mathematics and statistics:
Saturday, September 26, 2009 at Smith College
featuring:
-
Plenary talks by
Mia Minnes, M.I.T. 
What would Hilbert do? Undecidability and decidabilty in mathematics Hilbert's vision of mathematics was of a vast game governed by simple rules, where all facts and proofs could be deduced systematically by finitely many applications of these rules. Throughout the twentieth century, we have seen dramatic counterexamples to this vision. However, it is still meaningful to study that part of mathematics that can be described in this way. In this talk, we will discuss the notion of a decision procedure and the related idea of computability. We will see examples of interesting mathematical problems that are decidable and, on the flip side, think about what it would mean for a problem to be undecidable. Coming full circle, we return to Hilbert and to his famous list of problems. In particular, his 10th problem proved to be a milestone in undecidability theory. We will trace through the history of its solution and notice the various consequences of undecidability that crop up. Anna Lysyanskaya, Brown University 
Modern Cryptography: Paradoxes and Applications Cryptography is the science of protecting communication and computation against malicious adversaries. When designing a cryptographic algorithm, we must make sure that the computation that the honest participants carry out is simple (for example, modular multiplication), while to break security of a scheme, an adversary must carry out a computational task for which no efficient method is known (for example, finding prime factorization). The existence of such computational constructs may sound surprising, but even more surprising are the applications! In this talk, I will review some of them, and in particular my own work on how to hold people accountable in case of unauthorized activities while allowing people whose activities are authorized to remain anonymous. -
short talks by students, -
lunch for all, a panel discussion on being a graduate student, -
no registration fee.
Please register to let us know you're coming.
Click here for the conference schedule and abstracts.
Directions, food and lodging here.
Funding for this conference is provided by
Last update: 9/18/09