Notes for the Governor's School lectures

I was asked to give some lectures to about 100 high school students attending the New Jersey Governor's School of Engineering and Technology during July, 2001. I was glad to do this. Here are notes of the lectures. Both the notes and the lectures were prepared in a hurry. The lectures almost followed the notes, but there are more scholarly details in the notes (including references for those readers who may be ambitious!). Readers should tell me of errors or bad writing, please.

At this time it is difficult to write mathematical formulas and notation using standard HTML. Therefore material is presented here in two formats, Postscript and PDF. I hope that everyone can read at least one of these.

Now (7/24/2001) improved, with student corrections included!

What is it?LinksLast changed
Lectures 0 & 1 & 2 [Postscript]   |   [PDF] 7/28/2001
Lecture 3 [Postscript]   |   [PDF] 7/24/2001
Lectures 4 & 5 [Postscript]   |   [PDF] 7/24/2001

   The titles of the lectures are:
       0. Historical and Social Context
       1. Secret Sharing
       2. Modular Arithmetic
       3. Fermat and Euler
       4. Public Key Encryption
       5. How Hard is Arithmetic?
Dheera Venkatraman contributed this image of the lecturer. Belief in the picture's version of reality may not be merited.

Maintained by greenfie@math.rutgers.edu and last modified 7/28/2001.