The Webinar on From Cicadas to the Internet: the Secrets of the Prime Numbers took place on Thursday, April 2nd, 2026 from 5 pm until 6 pm, with Dr. Matilde Lalin, Professor of Mathematics at the University of Montreal in Canada, as our invited speaker. This virtual event was free and open to the general public.
The speaker started the virtual event by explaining what the prime numbers are and highlighted that Euclides showed that the prime numbers are infinite. Dr. Matilde Lalin then described the Prime Number Theorem and Goldbach’s Conjecture and mentioned the mathematicians Carl Friedrich Gauss, Emmy Noether, Eratosthenes of Cyrene, Leonhard Euler, Bernhard Riemann, among others. The speaker defined the twin primes, the Mersenne primes, truncatable primes and Sophie Germain’s primes. Dr. Matilde Lalin also shared several concrete examples of how the prime numbers appear in nature, in engineering and in computing.
