Igor Shparlinski, the son of a piano teacher and an engineer, was born in 1956 in Kiev. After moving to Moscow in 1967, he graduated from a Selective High School in Mathematics in 1972. He received his PhD in mathematics in 1980 from the Moscow State Pedagogical University. His main research interests are number theory and its applications to cryptography, complexity theory, quantum algorithms. He has published around 300 journal and conference papers on these subjects. Igor first came to Macquarie University in 1991 as a visitor of Professor Alf van der Poorten. He, his wife Irina and daughter Julia, immigrated to Australia the following year and he joined the Computing Department. Since then he has climbed all steps of the academic ladder, from Lecturer to Professor. In 1996 he was awarded the Medal of the Australian Mathematical Society, and in 2004 he became an Australian Professorial Fellow.

Numbers at work and play
by Professor Igor Shparlinski

Number theory is the oldest yet liveliest area of mathematics and in this short talk Igor will try to give a glimpse of inner beauty and external usefulness of number theory, which has been his main area of research for more than 30 years.

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