From the Mount of Olives to Elliptic Curves

A city surrounded by mountains called Debre Zeit sits in the middle of Ethiopia. The name means "Mount of Olives." This is where Fikreab Solomon Admasu grew up. He remembers one summer break, when he was young, he travelled up one of the mountains for the first time with his older sister and identical twin brother, and saw the city from above. "We just wanted to get up to the top and see what was there," he said. From their high position they found a sprawling panorama of the wavy, green Ethiopian landscape, their hometown nestled among its circular blue-green lakes.

Fikreab is now climbing mathematical mountains instead as student at ICTP. He and his twin brother, Alemayehu, have been supporting and competing with each other since they were young. "We used to be very playful when we were children, and we were more interested in playing than school subjects -- until we reached physics class." 

They turned their competitive energy toward their studies, and they continued to grow to love the sciences. Fikreab, who said he was not a great student in general, got a perfect score on his final math exam. Out of all the subjects, he found mathematics to be effortless, and that realization of his talent would change his life forever.

Fikreab remembers that he received support from family and teachers to pursue his talent in mathematics even though most Ethiopians didn't see the pragmatic use for it. "There was little awareness of mathematics. All they think is that I'd just add numbers," he said. People assumed he would be a high school teacher, and for a while Fikreab considered it. But his family helped him get to a university where he could advance his own study instead.

Fikreab and his brother went to Addis Ababa University and did well, but the classes were not as engagingly new as they had hoped. They fed their curiosity by attending extracurricular seminars. Finally, in their last year of study, they learned about ICTP where they could further advance their studies.

The twin brothers remain close to this day, and both are at ICTP -- Fikreab studying mathematics, Alemayehu studying physics. The education available at ICTP is different than at his home country, Fikreab noted. In Ethiopia, any teacher with a science degree will teach any science subject. Here professors teach their specialty, and he can learn from professors who are doing research in the field that interests him most. "It's really nice to be learning science from people really working in their particular subject," he said.

Here at ICTP Fikreab has begun to explore mathematics as a career, and he has already been admitted to SISSA to continue his development as a mathematician. His current project is on elliptic curves that are useful for cryptography -- using the mathematics behind geometric shapes to conceal information and transfer it safely over the Internet. It's a method currently used by Google, and generates codes that can be unravelled if you know the points being used on the curve. But if you don't, the code will take years to crack, even for a computer.