Yael Tauman Kalai is a pioneering theoretical computer scientist who’s won impressive awards and changed the way people think about the internet. But as a kid, she wasn’t exactly a model student.

“I was a troublemaker,” she said. “I was basically — not quite, but basically — kicked out of high school.”

Kalai was born and raised in Tel Aviv, Israel, in an academic family. Her father, Yair Tauman, is an economist and game theorist. Her high school classes bored her — one report card documented something like 150 school absences, she recalls, as she preferred to spend her time water skiing and socializing. But her analytical skills were always there.

“When my parents didn’t let me go out, often the only way to get my dad to agree was to tell him, ‘OK, give me a math riddle. As hard as you want, but if I solve, I go.’” She usually went.

Her dormant love of math finally awakened in college, when she began to recognize its beauty. Eventually, she discovered she could put this math to use with computers and, specifically, securing information. Now, her work straddles the fields of math and computer science, and her ideas have been foundational to how we protect and verify computation in the digital age. For the past two decades, she has worked to ensure the integrity of our smartphones, cloud connections and even cryptocurrencies. Now a researcher at Microsoft and an adjunct professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, she recently won the Association for Computer Machinery’s prestigious ACM Prize in Computing for “breakthroughs in verifiable delegation of computation and fundamental contributions to cryptography.” Her latest work also looks to the future, as she considers on how quantum computers may affect the security landscape.

Quanta spoke with Kalai about leaking secrets, verifying the cloud and the funkiness of quantum computing. The interview has been condensed and edited for clarity.