Leonard Adleman

Leonard Adleman ( born December 31, 1945 in San Francisco) is an American professor of computer science and molecular biology at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles. For the development of the RSA algorithm in 2002 he received the Turing Award, one of the highest awards in the field of computer science.

Biography

Adleman grew up in San Francisco. He studied at the University of California at Berkeley, where in 1968 he received his bachelors degree. He then worked programmer at Bank of America and fluctuated between another physics or medical school. An article on Gödel's theorem by Martin Gardner let him go for computer science. In 1976 he received his doctorate in electrical engineering and computer science ( EECS = Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences ) at Manuel Blum ( Number Theoretic Aspects of Computational Complexities ). After that, he was from 1976 Instructor, Assistant Professor from 1977 and from 1979 Associate professor of mathematics at MIT, where he met Ronald L. Rivest and Adi Shamir, with whom he developed the RSA algorithm. Founded in 1983, your company, RSA Data Security Inc., in the Adleman was president, they sold in 1996 for $ 200 million. In 1980 he joined as an associate professor at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, where he is professor since 1983, since 1985 Henri Salvatori Professor.

Together with Carl Pomerance and Robert Rumely, he also developed the Adleman - Pomerance - Rumely Primality Test (APR, also APRCL because by Henri Cohen and Hendrik Lenstra improved).

With Roger Heath- Brown, he proved that there are infinitely many prime exponents that satisfy the Fermat conjecture.

As Adi Shamir for the original knapsack problem he found early 1980s, methods, improved Merkle -Hellman cryptosystems to break.

Before the proof of Manindra Agrawal that a polynomial deterministic algorithm for primality tests exists, he proved with M.-D. A. Huang that a random algorithm exists in polynomial time. Previously, in 1977 Robert M. Solovay and Volker already roads shown the existence of a polynomial - time algorithm for the random test for primality in composite numbers.

Adleman also dealt with computer viruses ( the inventor of computer viruses, Fred Cohen, earned his doctorate at him about it in 1986, with the first publications to 1984) and also with " biological " immunology. He dealt with David Wofsy with the decrease in T- cells in AIDS and led her back to a homeostatic mechanism. Their work, however, was initially received little attention from immunologists. But you awakened his interest in molecular biology, which he also practically studied at the University of California, San Francisco. He noticed an analogy of DNA polymerase on to Turing machines, which inspired him to own experiments. In 1994 he presented in his paper Molecular Computation of Solutions To Combinatorial problem is the experimental use of deoxyribonucleic acid ( DNA) as a computer system that made him the founder of DNA computing. In the article he solved with the help of DNA, a Hamiltonian cycle problem on a graph with seven nodes and thus described the first successful attempt to use a biocomputer. 2002 Adleman succeeded in solving a much more complex problem with the DNA computer. These were a 3- SAT problem, a special satisfiability of propositional logic, with 20 variables and more than one million potential results.

Adleman in 1992 was also a mathematical consultant for the film Sneakers - The Silent Ones.

He is a member of the National Academy of Engineering since 1996. For the invention of the RSA method he got together with Rivest and Shamir next to the Turing Award ( 2002), in 2000 the IEEE Kobayashi Award, and in 1996 with these and Whitfield Diffie, Martin Hellman, Ralph Merkle the ACM Paris Kanellakis - Prize.

Adleman is married and has three children.

Writings

• With Kevin S. McCurley: Open problems in number theoretic complexity. In David S. Johnson et al. (Eds.): Discrete Algorithms and Complexity. Academic Press, 1986, pp. 237-262
• With Kevin S. McCurley: Open problems in number theoretic complexity, II ANTS -I ( Lecture Notes Computer Science 877), Springer- Verlag 1994, pp. 291-322