Leonard Adleman

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.<ref name=":0">Template:Cite web</ref> He is also known for the creation of the field of DNA computing and coining the term computer virus.<ref>Template:Cite web</ref>

Biography

Leonard M. Adleman was born to a Jewish<ref name="amturing.acm.org">Leonard (Len) Max Adleman 2002 Recipient of the ACM Turing Award Interviewed by Hugh Williams, August 18, 2016 amturing.acm.org</ref> family in California. His family had originally immigrated to the United States from modern-day Belarus, from the Minsk area.<ref name="amturing.acm.org"/> 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.<ref name=":0" /><ref>Template:MathGenealogy</ref> He was also the mathematical consultant on the movie Sneakers.<ref>Template:Cite web</ref> In 1996, he became a member of the National Academy of Engineering<ref>Template:Cite web</ref> for contributions to the theory of computation and cryptography. He is also a member of the National Academy of Sciences.<ref>Template:Cite web</ref>

Adleman is also an amateur boxer and has sparred with James Toney.<ref>Professor Adleman versus World Champion Boxer – YouTube</ref>

Discovery

In 1994, his paper Molecular Computation of Solutions To Combinatorial Problems described the experimental use of DNA as a computational system.<ref>Template:Cite web</ref> In it, he solved a seven-node instance of the Hamiltonian Graph 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.<ref>Template:Cite journal</ref> Adleman is widely referred to as the Father of DNA Computing.<ref>Template:Cite web</ref>

In 2002, he and his research group managed to solve a 'nontrivial' problem using DNA computation.<ref name="Braich et al 2002 pp. 499–502">Template:Cite journal</ref> Specifically, they solved a 20-variable SAT problem having more than 1 million potential solutions. They did it like the one Adleman used in his seminal 1994 paper. First, a mixture of DNA strands logically representative of the problem's solution space was synthesized. This mixture was then operated algorithmically using biochemical techniques to winnow out the 'incorrect' strands, leaving behind only those strands that 'satisfied' the problem. Analysis of the nucleotide sequence of these remaining strands revealed 'correct' solutions to the original problem.<ref name=":0" />

He is one of the original discoverers of the Adleman–Pomerance–Rumely primality test.<ref>Template:Cite book</ref><ref>Template:Cite web</ref>

Fred Cohen, in his 1984 paper, Experiments with Computer Viruses credited Adleman with coining the term "computer virus".<ref>Template:Citation</ref>

As of 2017, Adleman is working on the mathematical theory of Strata. He is a Computer Science professor at the University of Southern California.<ref>Template:Cite web</ref>

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.<ref name=":0" /> Adleman was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2006<ref name="AAAS">Template:Cite web</ref> and a 2021 ACM Fellow.<ref>Template:Cite web</ref>

See also

• List of famous programmers
• List of pioneers in computer science

External links

• Adleman's homepage
• Turing Award Citation
• Mathematical consultant for movie Sneakers
• Template:MathGenealogy