Elliptic curve

Elliptic curves are basically shapes that look like ovals. Imagine drawing a big oval on a piece of paper. Now, we can use some math to figure out some really cool things about that oval. We can add points on the oval, just like we add numbers together. But instead of just adding two numbers like 1 + 1 = 2, we can add two points on the oval and get another point on the oval.

This might sound weird, but it's kind of like playing connect the dots. If we have one point on the oval, and we draw a line to another point on the oval, the line will intersect the oval at a third point. We can then add those three points together to get another point on the oval. We can keep doing this over and over again, and we'll get a whole bunch of points on the oval.

But these ovals are different than regular ones you might see. They have some really cool properties that make them useful in things like cryptography (which is a fancy way of saying "secret codes"). Basically, we can use these points on the oval to create a public key and a private key. The public key is like a special code that we can give to anyone, and they can use it to send us messages that only we can read with our private key.

So, long story short, elliptic curves are just cool shapes that we can use to make secret codes that keep our messages safe.