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 The ACM A. M. Turing Award is an annual prize given by the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) for contributions of lasting and major technical importance to computer science. It is generally recognized as the highest distinction in the fi ...

. He is also known for the creation of the field of

DNA computing DNA computing is an emerging branch of unconventional computing which uses DNA, biochemistry, and molecular biology hardware, instead of the traditional electronic computing. Research and development in this area concerns theory, experiments, a ...

and coining the term

computer virus A computer virus is a type of malware that, when executed, replicates itself by modifying other computer programs and Code injection, inserting its own Computer language, code into those programs. If this replication succeeds, the affected areas ...

Biography

Leonard M. Adleman was born to a

Jewish Jews (, , ), or the Jewish people, are an ethnoreligious group and nation, originating from the Israelites of History of ancient Israel and Judah, ancient Israel and Judah. They also traditionally adhere to Judaism. Jewish ethnicity, rel ...

Leonard (Len) Max Adleman 2002 Recipient of the ACM Turing Award
Interviewed by Hugh Williams, August 18, 2016 amturing.acm.org family in

California California () is a U.S. state, state in the Western United States that lies on the West Coast of the United States, Pacific Coast. It borders Oregon to the north, Nevada and Arizona to the east, and shares Mexico–United States border, an ...

. His family had originally immigrated to the United States from modern-day

Belarus Belarus, officially the Republic of Belarus, is a landlocked country in Eastern Europe. It is bordered by Russia to the east and northeast, Ukraine to the south, Poland to the west, and Lithuania and Latvia to the northwest. Belarus spans an a ...

, from the

Minsk Minsk (, ; , ) is the capital and largest city of Belarus, located on the Svislach (Berezina), Svislach and the now subterranean Nyamiha, Niamiha rivers. As the capital, Minsk has a special administrative status in Belarus and is the administra ...

area. He grew up in

San Francisco San Francisco, officially the City and County of San Francisco, is a commercial, Financial District, San Francisco, financial, and Culture of San Francisco, cultural center of Northern California. With a population of 827,526 residents as of ...

and attended the

University of California, Berkeley The University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley, Berkeley, Cal, or California), is a Public university, public Land-grant university, land-grant research university in Berkeley, California, United States. Founded in 1868 and named after t ...

, 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 Sneakers (American English, US) or trainers (British English, UK), also known by a #Names, wide variety of other names, are shoes primarily designed for sports or other forms of physical exercise, but are also widely used for everyday casual ...

''. In 1996, he became a member of the

National Academy of Engineering The National Academy of Engineering (NAE) is an American Nonprofit organization, nonprofit, NGO, non-governmental organization. It is part of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine (NASEM), along with the National Academ ...

for contributions to the theory of computation and cryptography. He is also a member of the

National Academy of Sciences The National Academy of Sciences (NAS) is a United States nonprofit, NGO, non-governmental organization. NAS is part of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, along with the National Academy of Engineering (NAE) and the ...

. Adleman is also an amateur boxer and has sparred with

James Toney James Nathaniel Toney (born August 24, 1968) is an American former professional boxer who competed from 1988 to 2017. He held multiple world championships in three weight classes, including the International Boxing Federation (IBF) and lineal ...

Discovery

In 1994, his paper ''Molecular Computation of Solutions To Combinatorial Problems'' described the experimental use of

DNA Deoxyribonucleic acid (; DNA) is a polymer composed of two polynucleotide chains that coil around each other to form a double helix. The polymer carries genetic instructions for the development, functioning, growth and reproduction of al ...

as a computational system. In it, he solved a seven-node instance of the

Hamiltonian Graph In the mathematical field of graph theory, a Hamiltonian path (or traceable path) is a path in an undirected or directed graph that visits each vertex exactly once. A Hamiltonian cycle (or Hamiltonian circuit) is a cycle that visits each verte ...

problem, an

NP-complete In computational complexity theory, NP-complete problems are the hardest of the problems to which ''solutions'' can be verified ''quickly''. Somewhat more precisely, a problem is NP-complete when: # It is a decision problem, meaning that for any ...

problem similar to the

travelling salesman problem In the Computational complexity theory, theory of computational complexity, the travelling salesman problem (TSP) asks the following question: "Given a list of cities and the distances between each pair of cities, what is the shortest possible ...

. 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 In mathematics and computer science, an algorithm () is a finite sequence of Rigour#Mathematics, mathematically rigorous instructions, typically used to solve a class of specific Computational problem, problems or to perform a computation. Algo ...

. 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. Specifically, they solved a 20-variable

SAT The SAT ( ) is a standardized test widely used for college admissions in the United States. Since its debut in 1926, its name and Test score, scoring have changed several times. For much of its history, it was called the Scholastic Aptitude Test ...

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. He is one of the original discoverers of the Adleman–Pomerance–Rumely primality test.

Fred Cohen Frederick B. Cohen (born 1956) is an American computer scientist and best known as the inventor of computer virus defense techniques. He gave the definition of "computer virus". Cohen is best known for his pioneering work on computer viruses, th ...

, in his 1984 paper, ''Experiments with Computer Viruses'' credited Adleman with coining the term "

". 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 Ronald Linn Rivest (; born May 6, 1947) is an American cryptographer and computer scientist whose work has spanned the fields of algorithms and combinatorics, cryptography, machine learning, and election integrity. He is an Institute Profess ...

and

Adi Shamir Adi Shamir (; born July 6, 1952) is an Israeli cryptographer and inventor. He is a co-inventor of the Rivest–Shamir–Adleman (RSA) algorithm (along with Ron Rivest and Len Adleman), a co-inventor of the Feige–Fiat–Shamir identification sc ...

, has been a recipient of the 1996

Paris Kanellakis Theory and Practice Award The Paris Kanellakis Theory and Practice Award is granted yearly by the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) to honor "specific theoretical accomplishments that have had a significant and demonstrable effect on the practice of computing". It wa ...

and the 2002

, often called the

Nobel Prize The Nobel Prizes ( ; ; ) are awards administered by the Nobel Foundation and granted in accordance with the principle of "for the greatest benefit to humankind". The prizes were first awarded in 1901, marking the fifth anniversary of Alfred N ...

of Computer Science. Adleman was elected a Fellow of the

American Academy of Arts and Sciences The American Academy of Arts and Sciences (The Academy) is one of the oldest learned societies in the United States. It was founded in 1780 during the American Revolution by John Adams, John Hancock, James Bowdoin, Andrew Oliver, and other ...

in 2006 and a 2021

ACM Fellow ACM Fellowship is an award and fellowship that recognises outstanding members of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM). The title of ACM Fellow A fellow is a title and form of address for distinguished, learned, or skilled individuals ...

References

External links

Adleman's homepage

Turing Award Citation

* {{DEFAULTSORT:Adleman, Leonard American computer programmers American science writers American people of Belarusian-Jewish descent 1945 births Living people Public-key cryptographers Scientists from the San Francisco Bay Area Turing Award laureates University of Southern California faculty Writers from San Francisco Jewish American scientists Jewish biologists UC Berkeley College of Engineering alumni Fellows of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences 2021 fellows of the Association for Computing Machinery Members of the United States National Academy of Engineering Members of the United States National Academy of Sciences 20th-century American scientists 21st-century American scientists American computer security academics UC Berkeley College of Letters and Science alumni

Biography

Discovery

Awards

See also

References

External links