2 Won an Abel award for work connecting Mathematics and Computer Science

Russell Impagliazzo, a professor of computer science at the University of California, San Diego, says the LLL algorithm has also resulted in what is known as homogeneous encryption, which allows computations to be performed on encrypted data without need to decode it.

Homogeneous encryption can allow you to deliver encrypted financial information to the credit bureau and, in turn, the credit bureau will calculate your credit score, says Dr. Impagliazzo. anything about you.

The algorithms, he said, were “almost fast enough” to be practical.

One of Dr. Wigderson’s important advances concerns what is called proof of knowledge. It’s important to show that you own something – for cryptocurrencies, that you actually have money – without revealing any information about what you know.

“You really should think about two sides that don’t trust each other,” says Dr. Wigderson.

A fanciful example is someone with “Where is Waldo?” The puzzle where the small character Waldo (outside North America, Waldo is commonly known as Wally) is hidden in an intricate drawing and this person has not found Waldo. On the other hand, you’ve found Waldo and are willing to sell the solution. How can you convince someone else that you actually found the Waldo without giving a free answer?

What you can do is ask the other person to turn around when you place a large piece of cardboard over the image with a small window cut that allows Waldo to be seen without revealing his exact location.

What Dr. Wigderson, working with other mathematicians, shows, is that any proof of mathematics can be considered a proof without knowledge. “That was great for me,” he said.

Dr. Lovász was born in Budapest in 1948. As a teenager he won the gold medal at the International Mathematical Olympiad in 1964, 1965 and 1966. Following in Paul Erdös, perhaps The most famous Hungarian mathematician of the 20th century, Dr. Lovász focuses on the field of combinatorics, studying patterns in the selection, placement and enumeration of objects. That field becomes important to many problems in computer science such as the design of computer networks.