The University of Wyoming Mathematics Department will be host to a Summer School entitled "Summer School on Computational Number Theory and Applications to Cryptography". This workshop will follow the successful style of the summer schools of the Rocky Mountain Mathematics Consortium that has been running successful summer conferences for twenty-four years. The conference is scheduled to last 19 days, from Monday June 19, 2005 to Friday July 7, 2006. Lectures will only take place during weekdays. Weekends and Friday afternoons are planned to be free for social activities. Each day of the meeting will begin with two plenary lectures by the main lecturers. It is planned to have two main lecturers per week. Each afternoon will also include 1-2 hours of talks of invited lecturers and presentations from the participants. In addition to the lectures, the conference will consist of student projects, group discussions, question and answer times, problem sessions and workshop periods. The objective of the summer school is to educate graduate students and faculty about the most recent developments in computational number theory and mathematical cryptography. The summer school will provide participants a cutting-edge survey of computational number theory and the consequences in modern day cryptography. Topics to be covered include: Primality and Integer Factorization, Arithmetic of Algebraic Number Fields and Algebraic Function Fields, the Discrete Logarithm Problem and related algorithms, Public Key Cryptography, Elliptic and Hyperelliptic Curve Cryptography, Pairings, and Multivariate Cryptography. Plenary lecturers include Eric Bach, Dan Bernstein, Renate Scheidler, Joseph H. Silverman, and Hugh C. Williams.
The impact of the program and further goals are to enhance the general population's understanding of the important role that mathematics plays in their lives through information security in practice, and to help middle school and high school teachers develop lessons for their classrooms. This will help students begin to understand and enjoy some of the basic mathematical and computational issues that arise in cryptography. The summer school will be a ideal for graduate students and junior faculty who intend to participate in future thematic programs such as the one at IPAM in Fall 2006 or at the Fields Institute in Fall 2006.
