Hugo Scolnik

Timeline

1. 1941–1973

   Mathematics in Buenos Aires and Zürich

   Born in June 1941, he earns a licenciatura in mathematical sciences at the University of Buenos Aires (UBA) in 1964. He completes a doctorate in mathematics at the University of Zürich in 1973 with a dissertation on nonlinear least squares problems, supervised by Bartel Leendert van der Waerden.

2. 1966–1976

   Co-directing the Latin American World Model

   He resigns from UBA in 1966 after the Night of the Long Batons and later works full-time at Bariloche. In its final phase, he becomes co-director of the Latin American World Model, a normative global model that the Fundación Bariloche builds after a 1970 meeting in Rio de Janeiro on MIT's World Model III. In 1976, IIASA publishes the model in the proceedings of its Second Symposium on Global Modelling.

3. 1973–1979

   Professor in Brazil

   Back at UBA in 1973, he is dismissed in 1974. After the military dictatorship begins, he emigrates to Brazil, where he works as a full professor at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro and Cândido Mendes University, and he returns to Argentina in 1979.

4. 1984

   Founding UBA's computing department

   In 1984, he creates the Departamento de Computación at UBA's Facultad de Ciencias Exactas, giving its own department to the computer science degree, which had been created in 1962 under the mathematics department. He serves as the department's first director.

5. 2002

   Robot soccer at UBA

   At the faculty, he sets up a robot soccer project whose team builds everything from scratch for a world championship in Korea, drawing on its researchers' experience in vision, control and robotics. In a 2002 championship, the team teaches its robots the rules of the game, and the robots play creatively in a non-human way, a form of emergent behavior. His publications span mathematical models, artificial intelligence, automata theory and numerical analysis.

6. 2003–2024

   A Platinum Konex Award

   He receives a Platinum Konex Award in 2003 for electronic engineering, communication and informatics, and the Dr. Manuel Sadosky Prize in 2005. In 2014, UBA names him a Gran Maestro and the National University of Cuyo awards him an honorary doctorate. A co-founder of the Association of Latin-Iberoamerican Operational Research Societies (ALIO), he receives the ALIO Medal in 2024.

7. 2013–2024

   Cryptography and information security

   He co-founds UBA's postgraduate program in information security, offered by its exact sciences, engineering and economics faculties. In 2013, he works on an algorithm to break 1024-bit asymmetric encryption, and in 2023 he and Juan Pedro Hecht propose a post-quantum key agreement protocol built on products of rectangular matrices. In November 2024, as a co-founder of CertiSur, he warns that sufficiently powerful quantum computers could break RSA and elliptic-curve cryptography.

8. As of October 2026

   Consulting professor at UBA

   He is a consulting professor (Profesor Consulto Titular) in UBA's Departamento de Computación, where he teaches cryptography and researches cryptography, numerical methods and nonlinear optimization. In January 2026, he and Juan Pedro Hecht propose post-quantum key encapsulation and digital signature protocols designed as compact, fast replacements for the key exchange and signatures in TLS 1.3.