Splash Biography



ELI JAFFE, UCLA Cryptography PhD student, Math Circle Teacher



Major: Computer Science

College/Employer: UCLA

Year of Graduation: G

Picture of Eli Jaffe

Brief Biographical Sketch:

I'm Eli, a PhD student at UCLA studying cryptography under Rafi Ostrovsky. I've also been teaching fun, extracurricular math lessons at the Los Angeles Math Circle and WorldSpeak Math Circle for over 4 years. I know that kids are much smarter than we give them credit for, and I like to prove it by teaching young students math that they normally wouldn't encounter until the university level. Math should be fun and it should be beautiful, and that's what you can expect if you take my class. Hope to see you there!



Past Classes

  (Clicking a class title will bring you to the course's section of the corresponding course catalog)

M204: Coke vs. Pepsi: An Intro to Graph Non-Isomorphism and Zero-Knowledge Proofs in Splash Winter 2020 (Feb. 01, 2020)
Suppose your friend tells you they can taste the difference between Coca-Cola and Pepsi. How would they prove it? In particular, can they prove it without revealing what the difference is? In this course we explore this simple problem and how it relates to a much deeper problem called Graph Non-Isomorphism, where one must determine whether two graphs (or networks) are actually the same graph. We will also learn about Zero-Knowledge Proofs, by which one can prove a statement to someone else without revealing any information besides the truth of the statement.