An Interview with Shafi Goldwasser & Silvio Micali

Total Page:16

File Type:pdf, Size:1020Kb

An Interview with Shafi Goldwasser & Silvio Micali last byte DOI:10.1145/2461256.2461281 Leah Hoffmann Q&A Cracking the Code Turing Award recipients Shafi Goldwasser and Silvio Micali talk about proofs, probability, and poker. THOUGH THEIR ROUTES to computer science differed, ACM A.M. Turing Award recipients Shafi Goldwasser and Silvio Micali have forged a com- mon path in the field since they met in graduate school. Goldwasser was born in Israel and got hooked on programming in college at Carnegie Mellon University. Micali was born in Italy and discovered his interest in the field at the University of Rome through courses in lambda cal- culus and logic. Now both at MIT (Gold- wasser holds a joint appointment at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel), the two have revolutionized cryptography by working through fun- damental questions and forging a link with computational complexity. Since their groundbreaking 1983 paper on probabilistic encryption, their work has transformed the scope of cryptog- raphy from encrypting private mes- sages to strengthening data security, facilitating financial transactions, and supporting cloud computing. What drew you both to the field? SILVIO: I started in physics and switched to mathematics. Then, to- ward the very end, I took two courses in discrete mathematics. So I switched to theoretical computer science and went to Berkeley, and that’s where I I drove up with a friend to see Berkeley cited and an exciting bunch. met Shafi. on a very sunny day. It was beautiful— SILVIO: By contrast, when I landed at SHAFI: I went to college at Carnegie green hills, bright blue skies—so off I Berkeley, it was raining, and I discov- Mellon in applied mathematics. At the went to Berkeley. At first, I was taking ered that I couldn’t speak English. I time, they didn’t have an undergradu- general courses, but then I ran into a knew there was a shuttle to campus, but ate degree in computer science, but group of theory students, one of whom I had to ask six people before they could there was a way to minor in computer was Silvio, and they sort of took me grasp what I wanted. But things light- science. When I graduated, I went to into their midst. The subject matter ened up once we formed this band of California for an internship at Rand as was appealing, but it was also a social brothers. This aspect Shafi mentioned I was interested in AI, and one weekend thing—the theory students were an ex- about sociability, [CONTINUED ON P. 118] VICKMARK BRYCE BY PHOTOGRAPH 120 COMMUNICATIONS OF THE ACM | JUNE 2013 | VOL. 56 | NO. 6 last byte [CONTINUED FROM P. 120] it’s very rel- information leaks.” evant, because at the end of the day we This often happens in mathemat- constructed a theory of interaction, so “This often happens ics—you start with something con- whatever attracted us to this interactive in mathematics— crete and you generalize, and in the thing was going to grow into a profes- end you get this beautiful theorem. sional interest, as well. you start with But you don’t start by saying, “Let’s something concrete think of a scheme that satisfies this You ended up having a common advi- security definition.” sor, Manuel Blum. and generalize, SILVIO: I agree that motivating exam- SHAFI: The turning point was a course and in the end ples are a big propeller for science. But by Blum on computational number we chose a very difficult problem that theory. At the end of the course, Blum you get this is a mixture of not only encryption, but asked this question about tossing a coin beautiful theorem.” also how you deal the cards after you over the telephone. And somehow the encrypt them and how you make sure idea that the combination of random- that the cards are getting a random ness, interaction and complexity of shuffle. We were fearless, but we were number theory problems could be used also lucky. to emulate simultaneity in communi- SHAFI: In a sense, what people re- cation—to make it seem like flipping a member is probabilistic encryption. coin on one end of the telephone and re- We were working on the problem of But there were also all these sub-contri- vealing it on the other hand happened how to play poker so that all partial in- butions that made their way into later at the same time rather than in succes- formation is hidden. I’m not really a larger bodies of work on protocols and sion—seemed unbelievably profound card player; it was all very abstract. We randomness. and exciting to me. And I think it’s true had this idea of using quadratic resid- about theoretical computer science in uosity, a hard problem from number One of the most powerful contribu- general… you use mathematics to solve theory, to code cards. So say the card tions was the notion of indistinguish- real-world problems, but you’re not re- is a seven of spades; we can think of its ability. ally bound by the rules and conventions name as a binary string and represent SILVIO: Computational indistinguish- of classical mathematics. each bit of this string as either a qua- ability roughly means that if you have dratic residue or Q-non-residue chosen limited computational power, being K The coin toss problem sounds simi- at random. We proved that all partial human, you cannot even distinguish R CKMA I lar to the game of mental poker that information about the cards was hid- between two things although they are V led to your 1983 paper on probabilistic den by this representation. It was al- very, very different from one another. In YCE R B encryption. most an afterthought to say, “Wait a the context of encryption, this implies BY S H SHAFI: P Mental poker had been posed minute, there’s a new public encryp- that if you are not the intended recipi- A before, but in that protocol, partial in- tion scheme here where you can prove ent of an encrypted message, not only R HOTOG formation could leak about the cards. very strong security property; no partial can you not figure out the message P 118 COMMUNIcatIONS OF THE acm | JUNE 2013 | VOL. 56 | NO. 6 last byte in its entirety, but you don’t have any why. To accomplish this, you interact inkling about its contents. with me in a way such that if I knew the SHAFI: Nor can you figure out rela- “Proofs are the most theorem were true, I could construct a tionships between different messages. frustrating things. virtual interaction with you that would be indistinguishable to me from the Indistinguishability also played a role They’re not fun true interaction. in your later work on zero knowledge to write and they’re SHAFI: It’s called the simulation par- interaction proofs and zero knowledge adigm. It was already in the probabilis- computations, where the notion of be- not fun to read. tic encryption paper as a proof method, ing unable to distinguish one reality They slow you down. but here it actually becomes part of the from another is the key to analyzing se- definition. If you think about this in- cure protocols. So we transformed terview, the fact that you are talking to SILVIO: Well, first of all, leaving zero them into a game.” us convinces you of the fact that we are knowledge aside for a moment, what real. But beyond that, you could proba- we created is a new kind of proof. Proofs bly have surmised what we’ve said from are the most frustrating things. They’re all the papers we have written. not fun to write and they’re not fun to read. They slow you down. So we trans- So a zero knowledge conversation is a formed them into a game. Say I claim a conversation that could have been sim- certain theorem to be true. Then I con- the theorem to somebody else. Sec- ulated so well that it would be indistin- vince you that the following game has ond, there is this probability of error. guishable from a real conversation. the following special property: if the We played 20 times, but maybe with a SHAFI: That’s right. If you can’t dis- theorem is true, I can win all the time. chance of one in a million, you would tinguish between a true interactive If the theorem is false, you win at least have not caught me if the theorem were proof and a simulated proof, you can half of the time. Now we play, and I win. false. But if we play 30 times, the chance conclude that the true interactive We play again, and I win again. Assume is one in a billion. And if we play 300 proof gave you nothing you couldn’t I win 20 times in a row. Then suddenly times, the chance is one in the number have obtained yourself, besides know- this very esoteric, long, tedious process of every elementary particle in the uni- ing that your questions were actually of verifying becomes, if not fun, at least verse. So all of a sudden this probabil- answered by a real prover. So, the fact quick and interactive. ity is so miniscule that, for all practical that in a true interactive proof the real This is a transformation in two sens- purposes, it can be equated to zero. prover answers your questions con- es. First, since the proof is interactive, vinces you that a proof is correct but what convinces you is that you really How did that lead to zero knowledge? gives nothing else.
Recommended publications
  • Reproducibility and Pseudo-Determinism in Log-Space
    Reproducibility and Pseudo-determinism in Log-Space by Ofer Grossman S.B., Massachusetts Institute of Technology (2017) Submitted to the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Science in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the MASSACHUSETTS INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY May 2020 c Massachusetts Institute of Technology 2020. All rights reserved. Author...................................................................... Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science May 15, 2020 Certified by.................................................................. Shafi Goldwasser RSA Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Thesis Supervisor Accepted by................................................................. Leslie A. Kolodziejski Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Chair, Department Committee on Graduate Students 2 Reproducibility and Pseudo-determinism in Log-Space by Ofer Grossman Submitted to the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science on May 15, 2020, in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Science in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Abstract Acuriouspropertyofrandomizedlog-spacesearchalgorithmsisthattheiroutputsareoften longer than their workspace. This leads to the question: how can we reproduce the results of a randomized log space computation without storing the output or randomness verbatim? Running the algorithm again with new
    [Show full text]
  • Tarjan Transcript Final with Timestamps
    A.M. Turing Award Oral History Interview with Robert (Bob) Endre Tarjan by Roy Levin San Mateo, California July 12, 2017 Levin: My name is Roy Levin. Today is July 12th, 2017, and I’m in San Mateo, California at the home of Robert Tarjan, where I’ll be interviewing him for the ACM Turing Award Winners project. Good afternoon, Bob, and thanks for spending the time to talk to me today. Tarjan: You’re welcome. Levin: I’d like to start by talking about your early technical interests and where they came from. When do you first recall being interested in what we might call technical things? Tarjan: Well, the first thing I would say in that direction is my mom took me to the public library in Pomona, where I grew up, which opened up a huge world to me. I started reading science fiction books and stories. Originally, I wanted to be the first person on Mars, that was what I was thinking, and I got interested in astronomy, started reading a lot of science stuff. I got to junior high school and I had an amazing math teacher. His name was Mr. Wall. I had him two years, in the eighth and ninth grade. He was teaching the New Math to us before there was such a thing as “New Math.” He taught us Peano’s axioms and things like that. It was a wonderful thing for a kid like me who was really excited about science and mathematics and so on. The other thing that happened was I discovered Scientific American in the public library and started reading Martin Gardner’s columns on mathematical games and was completely fascinated.
    [Show full text]
  • Fault-Tolerant Distributed Computing in Full-Information Networks
    Fault-Tolerant Distributed Computing in Full-Information Networks Shafi Goldwasser∗ Elan Pavlov Vinod Vaikuntanathan∗ CSAIL, MIT MIT CSAIL, MIT Cambridge MA, USA Cambridge MA, USA Cambridge MA, USA December 15, 2006 Abstract In this paper, we use random-selection protocols in the full-information model to solve classical problems in distributed computing. Our main results are the following: • An O(log n)-round randomized Byzantine Agreement (BA) protocol in a synchronous full-information n network tolerating t < 3+ faulty players (for any constant > 0). As such, our protocol is asymp- totically optimal in terms of fault-tolerance. • An O(1)-round randomized BA protocol in a synchronous full-information network tolerating t = n O( (log n)1.58 ) faulty players. • A compiler that converts any randomized protocol Πin designed to tolerate t fail-stop faults, where the n source of randomness of Πin is an SV-source, into a protocol Πout that tolerates min(t, 3 ) Byzantine ∗ faults. If the round-complexity of Πin is r, that of Πout is O(r log n). Central to our results is the development of a new tool, “audited protocols”. Informally “auditing” is a transformation that converts any protocol that assumes built-in broadcast channels into one that achieves a slightly weaker guarantee, without assuming broadcast channels. We regard this as a tool of independent interest, which could potentially find applications in the design of simple and modular randomized distributed algorithms. ∗Supported by NSF grants CNS-0430450 and CCF0514167. 1 1 Introduction The problem of how n players, some of who may be faulty, can make a common random selection in a set, has received much attention.
    [Show full text]
  • Single-To-Multi-Theorem Transformations for Non-Interactive Statistical Zero-Knowledge
    Single-to-Multi-Theorem Transformations for Non-Interactive Statistical Zero-Knowledge Marc Fischlin Felix Rohrbach Cryptoplexity, Technische Universität Darmstadt, Germany www.cryptoplexity.de [email protected] [email protected] Abstract. Non-interactive zero-knowledge proofs or arguments allow a prover to show validity of a statement without further interaction. For non-trivial statements such protocols require a setup assumption in form of a common random or reference string (CRS). Generally, the CRS can only be used for one statement (single-theorem zero-knowledge) such that a fresh CRS would need to be generated for each proof. Fortunately, Feige, Lapidot and Shamir (FOCS 1990) presented a transformation for any non-interactive zero-knowledge proof system that allows the CRS to be reused any polynomial number of times (multi-theorem zero-knowledge). This FLS transformation, however, is only known to work for either computational zero-knowledge or requires a structured, non-uniform common reference string. In this paper we present FLS-like transformations that work for non-interactive statistical zero-knowledge arguments in the common random string model. They allow to go from single-theorem to multi-theorem zero-knowledge and also preserve soundness, for both properties in the adaptive and non-adaptive case. Our first transformation is based on the general assumption that one-way permutations exist, while our second transformation uses lattice-based assumptions. Additionally, we define different possible soundness notions for non-interactive arguments and discuss their relationships. Keywords. Non-interactive arguments, statistical zero-knowledge, soundness, transformation, one-way permutation, lattices, dual-mode commitments 1 Introduction In a non-interactive proof for a language L the prover P shows validity of some theorem x ∈ L via a proof π based on a common string crs chosen by some external setup procedure.
    [Show full text]
  • 1 Introduction
    Logic Activities in Europ e y Yuri Gurevich Intro duction During Fall thanks to ONR I had an opp ortunity to visit a fair numb er of West Eu rop ean centers of logic research I tried to learn more ab out logic investigations and appli cations in Europ e with the hop e that my exp erience may b e useful to American researchers This rep ort is concerned only with logic activities related to computer science and Europ e here means usually Western Europ e one can learn only so much in one semester The idea of such a visit may seem ridiculous to some The mo dern world is quickly growing into a global village There is plenty of communication b etween Europ e and the US Many Europ ean researchers visit the US and many American researchers visit Europ e Neither Americans nor Europ eans make secret of their logic research Quite the opp osite is true They advertise their research From ESPRIT rep orts the Bulletin of Europ ean Asso ciation for Theoretical Computer Science the Newsletter of Europ ean Asso ciation for Computer Science Logics publications of Europ ean Foundation for Logic Language and Information publications of particular Europ ean universities etc one can get a go o d idea of what is going on in Europ e and who is doing what Some Europ ean colleagues asked me jokingly if I was on a reconnaissance mission Well sometimes a cow wants to suckle more than the calf wants to suck a Hebrew proverb It is amazing however how dierent computer science is esp ecially theoretical com puter science in Europ e and the US American theoretical
    [Show full text]
  • Race in the Age of Obama Making America More Competitive
    american academy of arts & sciences summer 2011 www.amacad.org Bulletin vol. lxiv, no. 4 Race in the Age of Obama Gerald Early, Jeffrey B. Ferguson, Korina Jocson, and David A. Hollinger Making America More Competitive, Innovative, and Healthy Harvey V. Fineberg, Cherry A. Murray, and Charles M. Vest ALSO: Social Science and the Alternative Energy Future Philanthropy in Public Education Commission on the Humanities and Social Sciences Reflections: John Lithgow Breaking the Code Around the Country Upcoming Events Induction Weekend–Cambridge September 30– Welcome Reception for New Members October 1–Induction Ceremony October 2– Symposium: American Institutions and a Civil Society Partial List of Speakers: David Souter (Supreme Court of the United States), Maj. Gen. Gregg Martin (United States Army War College), and David M. Kennedy (Stanford University) OCTOBER NOVEMBER 25th 12th Stated Meeting–Stanford Stated Meeting–Chicago in collaboration with the Chicago Humanities Perspectives on the Future of Nuclear Power Festival after Fukushima WikiLeaks and the First Amendment Introduction: Scott D. Sagan (Stanford Introduction: John A. Katzenellenbogen University) (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign) Speakers: Wael Al Assad (League of Arab Speakers: Geoffrey R. Stone (University of States) and Jayantha Dhanapala (Pugwash Chicago Law School), Richard A. Posner (U.S. Conferences on Science and World Affairs) Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit), 27th Judith Miller (formerly of The New York Times), Stated Meeting–Berkeley and Gabriel Schoenfeld (Hudson Institute; Healing the Troubled American Economy Witherspoon Institute) Introduction: Robert J. Birgeneau (Univer- DECEMBER sity of California, Berkeley) 7th Speakers: Christina Romer (University of Stated Meeting–Stanford California, Berkeley) and David H.
    [Show full text]
  • Magic Adversaries Versus Individual Reduction: Science Wins Either Way ?
    Magic Adversaries Versus Individual Reduction: Science Wins Either Way ? Yi Deng1;2 1 SKLOIS, Institute of Information Engineering, CAS, Beijing, P.R.China 2 State Key Laboratory of Cryptology, P. O. Box 5159, Beijing ,100878,China [email protected] Abstract. We prove that, assuming there exists an injective one-way function f, at least one of the following statements is true: – (Infinitely-often) Non-uniform public-key encryption and key agreement exist; – The Feige-Shamir protocol instantiated with f is distributional concurrent zero knowledge for a large class of distributions over any OR NP-relations with small distinguishability gap. The questions of whether we can achieve these goals are known to be subject to black-box lim- itations. Our win-win result also establishes an unexpected connection between the complexity of public-key encryption and the round-complexity of concurrent zero knowledge. As the main technical contribution, we introduce a dissection procedure for concurrent ad- versaries, which enables us to transform a magic concurrent adversary that breaks the distribu- tional concurrent zero knowledge of the Feige-Shamir protocol into non-black-box construc- tions of (infinitely-often) public-key encryption and key agreement. This dissection of complex algorithms gives insight into the fundamental gap between the known universal security reductions/simulations, in which a single reduction algorithm or simu- lator works for all adversaries, and the natural security definitions (that are sufficient for almost all cryptographic primitives/protocols), which switch the order of qualifiers and only require that for every adversary there exists an individual reduction or simulator. 1 Introduction The seminal work of Impagliazzo and Rudich [IR89] provides a methodology for studying the lim- itations of black-box reductions.
    [Show full text]
  • A Decade of Lattice Cryptography
    Full text available at: http://dx.doi.org/10.1561/0400000074 A Decade of Lattice Cryptography Chris Peikert Computer Science and Engineering University of Michigan, United States Boston — Delft Full text available at: http://dx.doi.org/10.1561/0400000074 Foundations and Trends R in Theoretical Computer Science Published, sold and distributed by: now Publishers Inc. PO Box 1024 Hanover, MA 02339 United States Tel. +1-781-985-4510 www.nowpublishers.com [email protected] Outside North America: now Publishers Inc. PO Box 179 2600 AD Delft The Netherlands Tel. +31-6-51115274 The preferred citation for this publication is C. Peikert. A Decade of Lattice Cryptography. Foundations and Trends R in Theoretical Computer Science, vol. 10, no. 4, pp. 283–424, 2014. R This Foundations and Trends issue was typeset in LATEX using a class file designed by Neal Parikh. Printed on acid-free paper. ISBN: 978-1-68083-113-9 c 2016 C. Peikert All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior written permission of the publishers. Photocopying. In the USA: This journal is registered at the Copyright Clearance Center, Inc., 222 Rosewood Drive, Danvers, MA 01923. Authorization to photocopy items for in- ternal or personal use, or the internal or personal use of specific clients, is granted by now Publishers Inc for users registered with the Copyright Clearance Center (CCC). The ‘services’ for users can be found on the internet at: www.copyright.com For those organizations that have been granted a photocopy license, a separate system of payment has been arranged.
    [Show full text]
  • The Best Nurturers in Computer Science Research
    The Best Nurturers in Computer Science Research Bharath Kumar M. Y. N. Srikant IISc-CSA-TR-2004-10 http://archive.csa.iisc.ernet.in/TR/2004/10/ Computer Science and Automation Indian Institute of Science, India October 2004 The Best Nurturers in Computer Science Research Bharath Kumar M.∗ Y. N. Srikant† Abstract The paper presents a heuristic for mining nurturers in temporally organized collaboration networks: people who facilitate the growth and success of the young ones. Specifically, this heuristic is applied to the computer science bibliographic data to find the best nurturers in computer science research. The measure of success is parameterized, and the paper demonstrates experiments and results with publication count and citations as success metrics. Rather than just the nurturer’s success, the heuristic captures the influence he has had in the indepen- dent success of the relatively young in the network. These results can hence be a useful resource to graduate students and post-doctoral can- didates. The heuristic is extended to accurately yield ranked nurturers inside a particular time period. Interestingly, there is a recognizable deviation between the rankings of the most successful researchers and the best nurturers, which although is obvious from a social perspective has not been statistically demonstrated. Keywords: Social Network Analysis, Bibliometrics, Temporal Data Mining. 1 Introduction Consider a student Arjun, who has finished his under-graduate degree in Computer Science, and is seeking a PhD degree followed by a successful career in Computer Science research. How does he choose his research advisor? He has the following options with him: 1. Look up the rankings of various universities [1], and apply to any “rea- sonably good” professor in any of the top universities.
    [Show full text]
  • Jeremiah Blocki
    Jeremiah Blocki Current Position (August 2016 to present) Phone: (765) 494-9432 Assistant Professor Office: 1165 Lawson Computer Science Building Computer Science Department Email: [email protected] Purdue University Homepage: https://www.cs.purdue.edu/people/faculty/jblocki/ West Lafayette, IN 47907 Previous Positions (August 2015 - June 2016) (May 2015-August 2015) (June 2014-May 2015) Post-Doctoral Researcher Cryptography Research Fellow Post-Doctoral Fellow Microsoft Research Simons Institute Computer Science Department New England Lab (Summer of Cryptography) Carnegie Mellon University Cambridge, MA UC Berkeley Pittsburgh, PA 15213 Berkeley, CA Education Ph.D. in Computer Science, Carnegie Mellon University, 2014. Advisors: Manuel Blum and Anupam Datta. Committee: Manuel Blum, Anupam Datta, Luis Von Ahn, Ron Rivest Thesis Title: Usable Human Authentication: A Quantitative Treatment B.S. in Computer Science, Carnegie Mellon University, 2009. (3.92 GPA). Senior Research Thesis: Direct Zero-Knowledge Proofs Allen Newell Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Research Research Research Interests Passwords, Usable and Secure Password Management, Human Computable Cryptography, Password Hash- ing, Memory Hard Functions, Differential Privacy, Game Theory and Security Journal Publications 1. Blocki, J., Gandikota, V., Grigorescu, G. and Zhou, S. Relaxed Locally Correctable Codes in Computa- tionally Bounded Channels. IEEE Transactions on Information Theory, 2021. [https://ieeexplore. ieee.org/document/9417090] 2. Harsha, B., Morton, R., Blocki, J., Springer, J. and Dark, M. Bicycle Attacks Consider Harmful: Quantifying the Damage of Widespread Password Length Leakage. Computers & Security, Volume 100, 2021. [https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cose.2020.102068] 3. Chong, I., Proctor, R., Li, N. and Blocki, J. Surviving in the Digital Environment: Does Survival Processing Provide and Additional Memory Benefit to Password Generation Strategies.
    [Show full text]
  • Communication Complexity (For Algorithm Designers)
    Full text available at: http://dx.doi.org/10.1561/0400000076 Communication Complexity (for Algorithm Designers) Tim Roughgarden Stanford University, USA [email protected] Boston — Delft Full text available at: http://dx.doi.org/10.1561/0400000076 Foundations and Trends R in Theoretical Computer Science Published, sold and distributed by: now Publishers Inc. PO Box 1024 Hanover, MA 02339 United States Tel. +1-781-985-4510 www.nowpublishers.com [email protected] Outside North America: now Publishers Inc. PO Box 179 2600 AD Delft The Netherlands Tel. +31-6-51115274 The preferred citation for this publication is T. Roughgarden. Communication Complexity (for Algorithm Designers). Foundations and Trends R in Theoretical Computer Science, vol. 11, nos. 3-4, pp. 217–404, 2015. R This Foundations and Trends issue was typeset in LATEX using a class file designed by Neal Parikh. Printed on acid-free paper. ISBN: 978-1-68083-115-3 c 2016 T. Roughgarden All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior written permission of the publishers. Photocopying. In the USA: This journal is registered at the Copyright Clearance Cen- ter, Inc., 222 Rosewood Drive, Danvers, MA 01923. Authorization to photocopy items for internal or personal use, or the internal or personal use of specific clients, is granted by now Publishers Inc for users registered with the Copyright Clearance Center (CCC). The ‘services’ for users can be found on the internet at: www.copyright.com For those organizations that have been granted a photocopy license, a separate system of payment has been arranged.
    [Show full text]
  • Party Time for Mathematicians in Heidelberg
    Mathematical Communities Marjorie Senechal, Editor eidelberg, one of Germany’s ancient places of Party Time HHlearning, is making a new bid for fame with the Heidelberg Laureate Forum (HLF). Each year, two hundred young researchers from all over the world—one for Mathematicians hundred mathematicians and one hundred computer scientists—are selected by application to attend the one- week event, which is usually held in September. The young in Heidelberg scientists attend lectures by preeminent scholars, all of whom are laureates of the Abel Prize (awarded by the OSMO PEKONEN Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters), the Fields Medal (awarded by the International Mathematical Union), the Nevanlinna Prize (awarded by the International Math- ematical Union and the University of Helsinki, Finland), or the Computing Prize and the Turing Prize (both awarded This column is a forum for discussion of mathematical by the Association for Computing Machinery). communities throughout the world, and through all In 2018, for instance, the following eminences appeared as lecturers at the sixth HLF, which I attended as a science time. Our definition of ‘‘mathematical community’’ is journalist: Sir Michael Atiyah and Gregory Margulis (both Abel laureates and Fields medalists); the Abel laureate the broadest: ‘‘schools’’ of mathematics, circles of Srinivasa S. R. Varadhan; the Fields medalists Caucher Bir- kar, Gerd Faltings, Alessio Figalli, Shigefumi Mori, Bào correspondence, mathematical societies, student Chaˆu Ngoˆ, Wendelin Werner, and Efim Zelmanov; Robert organizations, extracurricular educational activities Endre Tarjan and Leslie G. Valiant (who are both Nevan- linna and Turing laureates); the Nevanlinna laureate (math camps, math museums, math clubs), and more.
    [Show full text]