Cryptography

Abstract

When I started at the University of Washington in 1979, my main area of research was p-adic analysis. I had just published a joint article with Benedict Gross about a p-adic formula for Gauss sums, and I was intrigued by the many p-adic analogies of classical formulas involving special functions and modular forms. I worked in this area for a while, but I found it difficult to prove results that had any depth. I could formulate interesting conjectures and maybe prove some special cases, but my results during the first few years in Seattle weren’t as definitive or important as those in the Gauss sum paper. I started looking for a new area of research that would be more satisfying.