Ryan Peterman

So computation is something that I'm interested in intrinsically.

I'm more into, over the years, realizing that computation, the field expanded to interact with all the sciences and that

computation happen everywhere in various forms in physics and biology and so on.

It makes it a fundamental object of study.

And for me, given the way I was brought up, I guess, it's fascinating in itself.

I know from just experience that lots of the theorems we prove, not many, but probably with much higher proportions than in other areas of math, are impactful in

in the world, in real systems, in security systems, in blockchains, in the real world.

But this side, this particular side of seeing exactly how you translate your algorithm into

into a system or your zero knowledge proof.

I predicted when we came up with the zero knowledge proof that it will never be implemented because the protocol that I described more or less to you is very costly.

I mean, you want to prove that I'm producing a product of two primes and I convert it to a map and then I do all this complicated procedure many times.

So it doesn't seem that anybody would ever use such a thing.

But I was wrong.

I didn't realize how motivated people can be and how important applications of their knowledge can be in the real world, not in theory of protocol design.

And they did simplify, maybe using more assumptions.

different assumptions.

There's a recent breakthrough of a postdoc here, Raul Ilango, you may have heard because it got some publicity in front and so on, where he introduced into the assumptions of cryptography not just hard computational problems but also things of the nature of Getter's theorem that

something is unprovable in some, you know, mathematical proof system, like, whatever mathematicians use.

Somehow using that, they can get zero knowledge that's non-interactive.

You can get, yeah, it's an amazing thing.