06/10/2026
“In high school, I liked math and was good at math and thought that I was going to be a mathematician: a weird thing to want to be as a teenager, but there it is. But I went to college with some people who were a lot better at math than I was. I started to understand if I worked as hard as I possibly could, maybe I could major in math, but I was never going to be a great mathematician. I was good enough at math to appreciate and enjoy it, but I wasn’t good enough to come up with original math. It’s like the ability to appreciate great classical music while also knowing that you’re never going to perform it at that level.
In theoretical math, the thinking is that we’re going to perfectly prove everything—there will be no exceptions. In some ways, cybersecurity’s the opposite: there’s no way to actually finish this job. Instead, we’re going to perfectly prove how secure this encryption algorithm is, and then we’ll implement it … but then someone’s got to manage the encryption keys, someone else has to install the update … and 1,000 things are going to go wrong.
The question I’ve found most interesting about cybersecurity research is: How do you marry the rigorous technical part with the imperfect human part? How do you characterize accurately what happens in that combination, and do that in a way that’s not all about blaming humans?
Part of my career has been about coming to terms with the fact that I was not going to be, as the great mathematicians are, perfect in that very specific way of ordering my thoughts rigorously, carefully, and beautifully. I still think mathematical proofs are beautiful, but I’ve come to enjoy solving other kinds of problems.
At the same time, I’ve realized that one of the things that I should be doing is thinking about some of these messier pieces of life, where that kind of rigor and that kind of structure is not necessarily as productive or applicable. There’s a lot that’s interesting and valuable in the parts of life that are not as perfectly ordered and as completely provable as Fermat’s last theorem—and there are great problems to be solved.”
—Josephine Wolff, professor of cybersecurity policy, The Fletcher School at Tufts University
is a series of personal stories shared by members of the Tufts community.
[📸: Andy Kwok/Tufts University]
