Alice Silverberg (born 1958) is professor of Mathematics and Computer Science at the

University of California, Irvine The University of California, Irvine (UCI or UC Irvine) is a public land-grant research university in Irvine, California. One of the ten campuses of the University of California system, UCI offers 87 undergraduate degrees and 129 graduate and p ...

. She was faculty at the

Ohio State University The Ohio State University, commonly called Ohio State or OSU, is a public land-grant research university in Columbus, Ohio. A member of the University System of Ohio, it has been ranked by major institutional rankings among the best pu ...

from 1984 through 2004. She has given over 300 lectures at universities around the world, and she has brought attention to issues of sexism and discrimination through her blog ''Alice's Adventures in Numberland''.

Research

Silverberg's research concerns

number theory Number theory (or arithmetic or higher arithmetic in older usage) is a branch of pure mathematics devoted primarily to the study of the integers and integer-valued functions. German mathematician Carl Friedrich Gauss (1777–1855) said, "Math ...

and

cryptography Cryptography, or cryptology (from grc, , translit=kryptós "hidden, secret"; and ''graphein'', "to write", or ''-logia'', "study", respectively), is the practice and study of techniques for secure communication in the presence of adve ...

. With

Karl Rubin Karl Cooper Rubin (born January 27, 1956) is an American mathematician at University of California, Irvine as Edward O. Thorp, Thorp Professor of Mathematics. Between 1997 and 2006, he was a professor at Stanford, and before that worked at Ohio S ...

, she introduced the CEILIDH system for torus-based cryptography in 2003, and she currently holds 10 patents related to cryptography. She is also known for her work on theoretical aspects of

abelian varieties In mathematics, particularly in algebraic geometry, complex analysis and algebraic number theory, an abelian variety is a projective algebraic variety that is also an algebraic group, i.e., has a group law that can be defined by regular func ...

Education and career

Silverberg graduated from

Harvard University Harvard University is a private Ivy League research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Founded in 1636 as Harvard College and named for its first benefactor, the Puritan clergyman John Harvard, it is the oldest institution of high ...

in 1979, and received her Ph.D. from

Princeton University Princeton University is a private research university in Princeton, New Jersey. Founded in 1746 in Elizabeth as the College of New Jersey, Princeton is the fourth-oldest institution of higher education in the United States and one of the n ...

in 1984 under the supervision of

Goro Shimura was a Japanese mathematician and Michael Henry Strater Professor Emeritus of Mathematics at Princeton University who worked in number theory, automorphic forms, and arithmetic geometry. He was known for developing the theory of complex multip ...

. She began her academic career at Ohio State University in 1984 and became a full professor in 1996. She moved to the University of California at Irvine in 2004 as Professor of Mathematics and Computer Science, and in 2018 she was awarded the title of Distinguished Professor. Over the past 25 years she has organized or co-organized more than ten conferences in mathematics and cryptography, and has served on the program committees of more than twenty others. Silverberg has a long record of service with the

American Mathematical Society The American Mathematical Society (AMS) is an association of professional mathematicians dedicated to the interests of mathematical research and scholarship, and serves the national and international community through its publications, meetings ...

and is currently a member of their nominating committee. She has served as an editor for the

Association for Women in Mathematics The Association for Women in Mathematics (AWM) is a professional society whose mission is to encourage women and girls to study and to have active careers in the mathematical sciences, and to promote equal opportunity for and the equal treatment o ...

since 2008, and recently joined the board of the Number Theory Foundation.

Honors

In 2012, Silverberg became a fellow of the

. She was elected to the 2019 class of fellows of the

"For her outstanding research in number theory and deep commitment to the promotion of fairness and equal opportunity evidenced by her service and outreach efforts", also citing her many invited lectures and her blog.

Additional work

In 2017, Silverberg began a blog entitled ''Alice's Adventures in Numberland'', which humorously discusses issues surrounding sexism in academia. This is a topic which she has previously discussed in interviews, and has been quoted on.

References

External links

Home pageAlice's Adventures in Numberland
{{DEFAULTSORT:Silverberg, Alice Living people 1958 births 20th-century American mathematicians 21st-century American mathematicians American women mathematicians Number theorists Harvard University alumni Princeton University alumni Ohio State University faculty University of California, Irvine faculty Fellows of the American Mathematical Society Fellows of the Association for Women in Mathematics 20th-century women mathematicians 21st-century women mathematicians Scientists from California 20th-century American women 21st-century American women