Almost all forms of communication on the internet are initiated and obfuscated by a method of public key cryptography. Perhaps the most important among these are credit card transactions. This talk will discuss why public key cryptography is considered safe enough for those transactions and how quantum computers are a threat to those methods.

The surface of a common donut is called a "torus." While it is a nice geometric object, it is
reasonable to wonder, "So What!" The purpose of this lecture is to illustrate the muscle power
of mathematics by showing how the mathematics of even this simple object explains so many mysteries that occur in everyday life and in our society. Indeed, one example (should time permit) even explains why the US House of Representatives has 435 seats.
*Pizza and soda served!

Magnetic resonance images typically contain signals from multiple chemical species such as water and fat. The diagnostic information in the image can be improved by separating the components of the signal coming from individual chemical species. The model that describes the signal generation includes non-linear parameters which arise from imperfections in the magnetic field and signal decay. The Cramer-Rao Bound is the minimum variance of an unbiased estimator of a parameter. In this work, we use the Cramer-Rao Bound to optimize the data acquisition for the non-linear inverse problem of estimating the magnetic field inhomogeneities and signal decay.