Peter Shor

Peter W. Shor ( born August 14, 1959 in New York ) is an American mathematician and computer scientist, known as the inventor of a quantum computer algorithm.

Shor went in Mill Valley, California on the high school and won a second prize as a student in the Mathematics Olympiad in 1977, when the U.S. team scored the most points. He studied as Putnam Fellow at Caltech in Pasadena until his bachelor's degree in 1981 and then went to MIT in Boston, where he earned his doctorate at Tom Leighton on the probabilistic analysis of the container problem in 1985. After a year as a post-doc at Berkeley, he took a job at Bell Lab in Murray Hill, New Jersey, to recover. He also taught at MIT, where he is Professor of Applied Mathematics and since 2003.

Shor is mainly known for his development of an exponentially fast factorization algorithm for quantum computers, which helped to break through this part of computer science in the 1990s ( Shor algorithm). The algorithm takes advantage of the very large parallel computing skills ( principle of superposition of wave functions in quantum mechanics ) of a potential quantum computer and uses the fast Fourier transform. He also created other quantum algorithms, such as error-correcting codes derived.

Shor received at the 1998 International Congress of Mathematicians in Berlin the Nevanlinna Prize, where he gave one of the plenary (Quantum Computing). In 1999 he received a MacArthur Fellowship.

Shor in 1998 was awarded the Dickson Prize in Science.