Duquesne Mathematician Contributes to Groundbreaking Online Database
A sophisticated database linking the vast theoretical world of math to the practical world of encryption and security has been formally unleashed online.
“You unknowingly deal with these complex computations dozens of times each day,” said Dr. Anna Haensch, assistant professor of mathematics and one of 70-plus participants from 12 countries who launched the gigantic L-functions and Modular Forms Database (LMFDB). “Nearly all of the cryptography that protects your private information online, in credit and debit transactions as well as on Facebook and Google, is based on a few really hard problems in the field of number theory.”
This project is essentially the first periodic table of elements for math. The atlas-like collection of previously uncharted computations, supported by the U.S. National Science Foundation and the United Kingdom Engineering and Physical Research Council, assembles more than a billion mathematical items in a single place and a unified format. Haensch alone spent the last year-and-a-half producing quaternary codes that can be used in electronic data transmission for this searchable database.
“Like the public DNA database, LMFDB lets us peek, for the first time, into the relationships of different mathematical items and trace their common ancestry. Another way to think about this is a huge Facebook for mathematical items. We can see what forms are friendly with other items—and can investigate these possibilities.”
By understanding these complicated structures, mathematicians will be able to build sophisticated cryptosystems that simultaneously transform and protect your data as it passes through the cloud, Haensch said.
“We are mapping the mathematics of the 21st century,” said Brian Conrey, director of the American Institute of Mathematics and LMFDB member. “The LMFDB is both an educational resource and a research tool that will become indispensable for future exploration.”
The LMFDB also means that the hundreds of years of computing time involved in compiling the database, along with thousands of hours of human effort, don’t need to be repeated again. Ever. Many of the calculations are so intricate that only a handful of experts can do them, and some computations are so big that it makes sense to do them only once. This leaves time and brain power to push the frontier of math further ahead.