Fred Piper (Royal Holloway, University of London)
How cryptography uses mathematics (or How cryptographers use mathematics)

Cryptography is used by companies to protect commercially sensitive information and by criminals to keep their activities secret from law enforcement. It is an ancient science whose popularity has increased dramatically since the advent of the Internet. In this lecture we will consider a number of aspects of the long standing battle between code makers and code breakers, and will look at some of the ways in which mathematics is used.