Carl Bernard Pomerance (born 1944 in Joplin,

Missouri Missouri is a U.S. state, state in the Midwestern United States, Midwestern region of the United States. Ranking List of U.S. states and territories by area, 21st in land area, it is bordered by eight states (tied for the most with Tennessee ...

) is an American number theorist. He attended college at

Brown University Brown University is a private research university in Providence, Rhode Island. Brown is the seventh-oldest institution of higher education in the United States, founded in 1764 as the College in the English Colony of Rhode Island and Providenc ...

and later received his

Ph.D. A Doctor of Philosophy (PhD, Ph.D., or DPhil; Latin: or ') is the most common degree at the highest academic level awarded following a course of study. PhDs are awarded for programs across the whole breadth of academic fields. Because it is ...

from

Harvard University Harvard University is a private Ivy League research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Founded in 1636 as Harvard College and named for its first benefactor, the Puritan clergyman John Harvard, it is the oldest institution of higher le ...

in 1972 with a dissertation proving that any odd

perfect number In number theory, a perfect number is a positive integer that is equal to the sum of its positive divisors, excluding the number itself. For instance, 6 has divisors 1, 2 and 3 (excluding itself), and 1 + 2 + 3 = 6, so 6 is a perfect number. T ...

has at least seven distinct

prime factor A prime number (or a prime) is a natural number greater than 1 that is not a product of two smaller natural numbers. A natural number greater than 1 that is not prime is called a composite number. For example, 5 is prime because the only ways ...

s. He joined the faculty at the

University of Georgia , mottoeng = "To teach, to serve, and to inquire into the nature of things.""To serve" was later added to the motto without changing the seal; the Latin motto directly translates as "To teach and to inquire into the nature of things." , establ ...

, becoming full professor in 1982. He subsequently worked at

Lucent Technologies Lucent Technologies, Inc. was an American multinational telecommunications equipment company headquartered in Murray Hill, New Jersey. It was established on September 30, 1996, through the divestiture of the former AT&T Technologies business u ...

for a number of years, and then became a

distinguished Professor Distinguished Professor is an academic title given to some top tenured professors in a university, school, or department. Some distinguished professors may have endowed chairs. In the United States Often specific to one institution, titles such ...

Dartmouth College Dartmouth College (; ) is a private research university in Hanover, New Hampshire. Established in 1769 by Eleazar Wheelock, it is one of the nine colonial colleges chartered before the American Revolution. Although founded to educate Native A ...

Contributions

He has over 120 publications, including co-authorship with

Richard Crandall Richard E. Crandall (December 29, 1947 – December 20, 2012) was an American physicist and computer scientist who made contributions to computational number theory. Background Richard Crandall was born in Ann Arbor, Michigan, and spent two years ...

of ''Prime numbers: a computational perspective'' (

Springer-Verlag Springer Science+Business Media, commonly known as Springer, is a German multinational publishing company of books, e-books and peer-reviewed journals in science, humanities, technical and medical (STM) publishing. Originally founded in 1842 in ...

, first edition 2001, second edition 2005), and with

Paul Erdős Paul Erdős ( hu, Erdős Pál ; 26 March 1913 – 20 September 1996) was a Hungarian mathematician. He was one of the most prolific mathematicians and producers of mathematical conjectures of the 20th century. pursued and proposed problems in ...

. He is the inventor of one of the

integer factorization In number theory, integer factorization is the decomposition of a composite number into a product of smaller integers. If these factors are further restricted to prime numbers, the process is called prime factorization. When the numbers are suf ...

methods, the

quadratic sieve The quadratic sieve algorithm (QS) is an integer factorization algorithm and, in practice, the second fastest method known (after the general number field sieve). It is still the fastest for integers under 100 decimal digits or so, and is considerab ...

algorithm, which was used in 1994 for the factorization of

RSA-129 In mathematics, the RSA numbers are a set of large semiprimes (numbers with exactly two prime factors) that were part of the RSA Factoring Challenge. The challenge was to find the prime factors of each number. It was created by RSA Laboratories ...

. He is also one of the discoverers of the

Adleman–Pomerance–Rumely primality test In computational number theory, the Adleman–Pomerance–Rumely primality test is an algorithm for determining whether a number is prime. Unlike other, more efficient algorithms for this purpose, it avoids the use of random numbers, so it is a dete ...

Awards and honors

He has won many teaching and research awards, including the

Chauvenet Prize The Chauvenet Prize is the highest award for mathematical expository writing. It consists of a prize of $1,000 and a certificate, and is awarded yearly by the Mathematical Association of America in recognition of an outstanding expository article ...

in 1985, MAA's

Deborah and Franklin Haimo Distinguished Teaching Award The Deborah and Franklin Tepper Haimo Awards for Distinguished College or University Teaching of Mathematics are awards given by the Mathematical Association of America to recognize college or university teachers "who have been widely recognized a ...

in 1997, and the

Levi L. Conant Prize The Levi L. Conant Prize is a mathematics prize of the American Mathematical Society, which has been awarded since 2000 for outstanding expository papers published in the ''Bulletin of the American Mathematical Society'' or the ''Notices of the Amer ...

in 2001 for "A Tale of Two Sieves". In 2012 he became a fellow of the

American Mathematical Society The American Mathematical Society (AMS) is an association of professional mathematicians dedicated to the interests of mathematical research and scholarship, and serves the national and international community through its publications, meetings, ...

. He also became the John G. Kemeny Parents Professor of Mathematics in the same year.

References

External links

Home page

2001 Conant Prize
an article in the Bulletin of the AMS, vol 48:4 (2001), 418–419. 1944 births 20th-century American mathematicians 21st-century American mathematicians Living people Number theorists 20th-century American Jews Brown University alumni Harvard University alumni Dartmouth College faculty University of Georgia faculty Fellows of the American Mathematical Society Mathematicians from Missouri 21st-century American Jews {{US-mathematician-stub

Contributions

Awards and honors

See also

References

External links