Distinguished Speaker Symposium on Prime Numbers and Cryptography

4 December 2024

News

We’re thrilled to share highlights of the second Distinguished Speaker Symposium of the year, which was held on the 21st November at the stunning Outernet, London.

The event was an incredible success with a packed out audience hearing fascinating talks from two renowned mathematicians, Cliff Cocks and James Maynard, on Prime Numbers and Cryptography.

Our Speakers

Cliff Cocks, former Chief Mathematician at GCHQ (the UK’s intelligence, security and cyber agency)
James Maynard, Field Medallist 2022

Explore our photo gallery, view highlights and watch full-length recordings of the talks!

Watch the highlights

Hello and welcome everybody to the, uh, G-Research Distinguished Speaker Symposium on prime numbers and cryptography. I'm, uh, really excited to be up here today introducing our first distinguished speaker and one of the real unsung pioneers of modern cryptography. It is with great pleasure that I ask you all to join with me in welcoming to the stage Dr. Cliff Cocks. It has undergone a massive change in my lifetime. When I started 50 years ago, it was something that was done in earnest, basically only by governments, and now you use cryptography. Every time you communicate on the internet, you make a purchase on the internet. It is basically something that you use many times every day. It's everywhere. A second speaker is, of course, probably best known to people in this room as the winner of the fields medal in, in 2022. Essentially, the highest honor in mathematics. So please welcome James Maynard. Thank you very much. There's a film Which says that every whole number can be written uniquely as a product of prime numbers, and this means that prime numbers are somehow the ATMs of rhythm tick and therefore lots of complicated problems to do with. Whole numbers can be broken down into simpler problems involving just trying them For the rest of the evening. We are all meant to relocate upstairs. This space actually has, uh, these amazing video screens. So what we've tried to do is actually have some mathematical animations that the riff a little bit on our logo and a little bit on maths, that, that may or may not have something to do with the topic of tonight. They're absolutely mind blowing and awesome, so please, please do check them out if you haven't already.

Open video transcript

Watch the talks

Exclusive interviews with our speakers

Watch Cliff Cocks’ exclusive interview now. Stay tuned for James Maynard’s interview, being released soon.

Cliff Cocks

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The G-Research Distinguished Speaker Symposium

The Distinguished Speaker Symposium is our flagship event and the 2024 edition – on Prime Numbers and Cryptography – was the third in our history.

In January 2024, our last Symposium focused on the Future of Chips and Electronics, when we heard from Professor Sir Andre Geim, Michael Kagan (CTO at NVIDIA) and journalist and author, James Ashton at the Odeon, Leicester Square, London.