Leonard Adleman (born December 31, 1945) is an American computer scientist. He is one of the creators of the RSA encryption algorithm, for which he received the 2002 Turing Award.
Biography
Leonard M. Adleman was born to a
Jewish[ Leonard (Len) Max Adleman 2002 Recipient of the ACM Turing Award Interviewed by Hugh Williams, August 18, 2016 amturing.acm.org] family in
California. His family had originally immigrated to the United States from modern-day
Belarus, from the
Minsk area.
He grew up in
San Francisco and attended the University of California, Berkeley, where he received his B.A. degree in mathematics in 1968 and his Ph.D. degree in EECS in 1976.
He was also the mathematical consultant on the movie
Sneakers.
In 1996, he became a member of the National Academy of Engineering
for contributions to the theory of computation and cryptography. He is also a member of the National Academy of Sciences.
Adleman is also an amateur boxer and has sparred with James Toney.[ Professor Adleman versus World Champion Boxer – YouTube]
Discovery
In 1994, his paper
Molecular Computation of Solutions To Combinatorial Problems described the experimental use of
DNA as a computational system.
In it, he solved a seven-node instance of the
Hamiltonian path problem, an
NP-complete problem similar to the travelling salesman problem. While the solution to a seven-node instance is trivial, this paper is the first known instance of the successful use of DNA to compute an
algorithm. DNA computing has been shown to have potential as a means to solve several other large-scale combinatorial search problems.
Adleman is widely referred to as the Father of DNA Computing.
In 2002, he and his research group managed to solve a 'nontrivial' problem using DNA computation.
He is one of the original discoverers of the Adleman–Pomerance–Rumely primality test.
Fred Cohen, in his 1984 paper, Experiments with Computer Viruses credited Adleman with coining the term "computer virus".
As of 2017, Adleman is working on the mathematical theory of Strata. He is a Computer Science professor at the University of Southern California.
Awards
For his contribution to the invention of the RSA cryptosystem, Adleman, along with
Ron Rivest and
Adi Shamir, has been a recipient of the 1996 Paris Kanellakis Theory and Practice Award and the 2002
Turing Award, often called the
Nobel Prize of Computer Science.
Adleman was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2006
and a 2021
ACM Fellow.
See also
-
List of famous programmers
External links
