English

The course begins with a study of the rebuilding of Europe and the stark division of the continent following the Second World War. It compares how countries across Western Europe embraced varying combinations of liberalism and socialism while the 'Iron Curtain' sealed Eastern Europe within Communism until that system's stunningly peaceful collapse that climaxed in November 1989 with the dismantling of the Berlin Wall. It also traces the evolution of the European Union, despite references to the 'United States of Europe', dating back to the earliest visions of European integration. The course analyzes how the European Union has been developing on a fundamentally different path from the United States of America and any other political system.

This course is an introduction to the key principles of sustainable development and the application of such principles in real world situations. These principles include: the social, environmental and economic pillars of sustainable development; global population, poverty and aid considerations; and the value of multiple sets of knowledge, in particular indigenous knowledge. A diverse set of case studies and issues of concern are addressed throughout the course and include: climate change; resources and waste; circular economy; biodiversity offsets; tourism industry; local community-government partnerships; and the options before us for the future development of human society in a world of limited carrying capacity.

This cryptography courses consists of the lectures "Public Key Cryptography" and "Cryptography for Security" as well as a practice session. Public Key Cryptography examines common methods in asymmetric encryption, as well as possible attacks in faulty implementation of these methods. Topics include RSA (including signatures), attacks on small public exponent, Wiener attack, primality tests and factorization, El-Gamal, Diffie-Hellman-Key-Exchange, elliptic curves, attacks on the discrete logarithm, and selected methods of Post-Quantum-Cryptography. Cryptography for Security discusses fundamental concepts of encryption as well as their construction and their connections, classical cryptographic problems and how to solve them, formal notions of security, One-Way-Functions, (Pseudo-)Random-Number-Generators, and Pseudo-Random-Functions. Practice sessions alternate between two formats that are both primarily focused on attacks learned in class. In the first, students read encryption code and write a corresponding decryption algorithm. In the second, students prove theorems/attacks' effectiveness and make calculations by hand, often involving topics in ring theory, field theory, and group theory.