18.783 | Spring 2021 | Undergraduate

Elliptic Curves

Course Description

This course is a computationally focused introduction to elliptic curves, with applications to number theory and cryptography. While this is an introductory course, we will (gently) work our way up to some fairly advanced material, including an overview of the proof of Fermat’s last theorem.
Learning Resource Types
Problem Sets
Lecture Notes
Instructor Insights
A donut shape object, a arrow pointing to two directions, and a circle filled with different colors and patterns.
A visualization of the Modularity theorem, which states that elliptic curves (left) and modular forms (right) are related via their L-functions (center). (Image courtesy of Dr. Andrew Sutherland.)