Margaret H. Wright: 2008 Math Is Key
Margaret H. Wright is the Silver Professor of Computer Science and former Chair of the Computer Science department at Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences, New York University, with research interests in optimization, linear algebra, and scientific computing.
She is a member of the National Academy of Science and the National Academy of Engineering. Earlier at Bell Laboratories, she became head of the Scientific Computing Research Department in 1997, and a Bell Labs Fellow (1998). She was awarded the John von Neumann prize in 2019 in recognition of her pioneering contributions to the numerical solution of optimization problems and to the exposition of the subject
She was the first female president of the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM) (1995-1996) and is senior editor of the SIAM Review. In 2002 she became a Fellow of the Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences. In 2009 she became a Fellow of the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics. In 2012 she became a fellow of the American Mathematical Society.
How Hard Can It Be?
Some problems in life are extremely hard (achieving world peace) while others are, for most of us, pretty easy (eating a good breakfast). How can we figure out in advance which problems are necessarily hard, sometimes hard, seldom easy, or frequently easy? This talk will describe how mathematics can very often (but not always) help to answer these questions, focusing mainly on how questions of hardness affect cryptography and computer security.
Margaret H. Wright is a Silver Professor Computer Science at Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences, New York University.
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