Abstract:
In early 2009 Dr. Huang left the Taiwan Stock Exchange (TWSE), where he actively served for more than nineteen years, to assume the chairmanship of Taiwan Certificate Authority (TWCA), a subsidiary of TWSE.
TWCA is the major internet security service provider to the financial service industry in Taiwan. With TWCA digital certificates in place, one can verify the authenticity of his counterparty in a transaction over the internet, and keep the information exchanges confidential. And once a transaction is done under such a Public Key Infrastructure (PKI), neither party is able to repudiate it. TWCA operates a PKI that supports, among other things, internet order routing to securities firms and internet banking that involves large fund transfers. In Taiwan, PKIs are also applicable to filing income tax returns, issuing electronic invoices, voting in general and extraordinary meetings, playing cyberspace games, and a variety of e‐government services.
Though Dr. Huang is by training a mathematician, he has not conducted any serious mathematical research for almost 20 years. He may call himself, at best, an armchair mathematician. His favorite pastime is number theory, i.e., the endless search for prime numbers. PKI, coincidentally, is a beautiful, and so far the most commercially successful, application of number theory. Each public key, in the most popular form of PKI, contains the product of two large prime numbers.
In July 2009, on top of his new capacity at TWCA, Dr. Huang was appointed a supervisor on the board of the Taiwan Futures Exchange (TAIFEX) by the Financial Supervisory Commission, representing the public interest, for a term of three years. It is quite a pleasure for him to work with some of the top quality minds both on the board and on the staff of TAIFEX. This additional duty has certainly made his life more interesting.
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