William Meehan Email & Phone Number

Recent Birmingham-Southern College graduate with mathematics major, exceptional critical thinking and writing skills, and combined coursework in mathematics and computer science. Currently employed by the UAH Center for Cybersecurity Research and Education as a Research Engineer.B.S. Mathematics - June 5, 2020, Birmingham Southern College, Birmingham AL Senior Research: The Jacobian Group of a Hyperelliptic Curve: Finding Secure Keys The Jacobian Group of a hyperelliptic curve has been useful to the field of cryptography. The genus 1, elliptic curves are well explored. Here, the set of points on the elliptic curve forms a group that is isomorphic to the Jacobian, the quotient group formed by the group of degree zero divisors modulo the group of principal divisors. However, this isometry no longer exists as we move to the higher genus hyper-elliptic curves. In his work and subsequent paper, Mr. Meehan explored the implications of moving to a higher genus. Using previous work by David Mumford, an algorithm by Cantor, and a reduction method by Gauss, he developed an environment in which to explore the genus 2 case, defined over a finite field, fixed by a large prime. This demonstrated the capacity of such curves to be used in a Diffie-Hellman Key Exchange, allowing for the secure transmission of private keys over an otherwise insecure channel. Relevant Coursework in Mathematics: Calculus I-III, Linear Algebra, Differential Equations, Number Theory, Statistics, Complex Analysis, Abstract Algebra, as well as Computational Math, Senior Research, Seminar and WritingRelevant Coursework in Computer Science: Intro to Computer Science (CS 170), Programming in Python (CAC 180), Computational Tools for Science (MA 305), Two-Dimensional Design (AR 111), Introduction to Experimental and Electronic Music (MU 154)

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  Birmingham-Southern College

  Mathematics