Post-modern coding and cryptography: securing the quantum internet

Rewley House

3 Dec 2025
7:30 pm - 9:00 pm

Richard Pinch

Annual Christmas Lecture

Coding Theory emerged as techniques for transmitting messages correctly in a noisy environment and found successful applications from CD/DVD players to space missions. At the same time, Public Key Cryptography was developed as tool for securing digital communications, especially the internet: their security is based on the difficulty of solving hard mathematical problems. Recently the advent of nearly practical quantum computers has overturned the assumptions about the difficulty of some of those problems.

Coding Theory enters into this story in two surprising and different ways. In this talk I will describe how error-correction techniques are helping to build practical quantum circuits; and how new public key cryptography ideas based on error correction is providing a new generation of quantum-resistant security.

About Richard Pinch

Richard is a retired civil servant, whose career has been divided between academic research in pure mathematics and its application to cybersecurity. He was the founding head of research at the Heilbronn Institute and has also served as Vice-President of the IMA. He continues in mathematical research as a consultant.

His interest in coding theory started when teaching a course in Communication Theory with Charles Goldie, later a student text.

Add event to your calendar.