The forty-fifth Virtual Encounter with Outstanding Mathematicians took place on Thursday, June 13th, 2024 from 5 pm until 6 pm. Amalia Pizarro, Professor at the Mathematics Institute of the University of Valparaiso, Chile, was our invited speaker. This virtual event was free and open to the general public.
On this forty-fifth Encounter, Amalia Pizarro shared anecdotes of her personal life and her professional journey as a female mathematician. The speaker also presented on “Algorithms, Secrets and Prime Numbers.” In this virtual event, Amalia Pizarro defined an algorithm as a finite sequence of logical and ordered steps with which we can solve a problem and mentioned that the first algorithm in history was written by Ada Lovelace. The speaker also explained what cryptography is and what cryptoanalysis means and shared the difference between cryptography of public key and cryptography of private key. Amalia Pizarro then described how all of this is related to prime numbers.