Leonard M. Adleman, American computer scientist, educator. Recipient Koji Kobayashi Computers and Communications award, Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, 2000, Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) Turing award, 2003, Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) Paris Kanallakis award, 1996, Alexander von Humboldt Fellowship and Distinguished Alumnus award, 1995.
Background
Adleman was born in California. He grew up in San Francisco and attended the University of California, Berkeley, where he received his Bachelor degree in mathematics in 1968 and his Doctor of Philosophy degree in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science in 1976.
Education
Bachelor of Science, University California, Berkeley, 1968. Doctor of Philosophy in Computer Science, University California, 1976.
Career
He was also the mathematical consultant on the movie Sneakers. Adleman is also an amateur boxer and has sparred with James Toney. In 1994, his paper Molecular Computation of Solutions To Combinatorial Problems described the experimental use of deoxyribonucleic acid as a computational system.
In it, he solved a seven-node instance of the Hamiltonian Graph problem, an Natural Philosophy-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 deoxyribonucleic acid to compute an algorithm. deoxyribonucleic acid computing has been shown to have potential as a means to solve several other large-scale combinatorial search problems.
In 2002, he and his research group managed to solve a "nontrivial" problem using deoxyribonucleic acid computation. Specifically, they solved a 20-variable SAT problem having more than 1 million potential solutions.
They did it in a manner similar to the one Adleman used in his seminal 1994 paper.
First, a mixture of deoxyribonucleic acid strands logically representative of the problem"s solution space was synthesized. This mixture was then operated upon 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, in his 1984 paper, Experiments with Computer Viruses has credited Adleman with coining the term "virus". He is also widely referred to as the Father of deoxyribonucleic acid Computing.
Currently, Adleman is working on the mathematical theory of Strata.
Achievements
Membership
National Academy of Sciences. American Academy of Arts and Sciences]
He is a member of the National Academy of Engineering and the National Academy of Sciences.
Turing award
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 ACM 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.
Turing award
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 ACM 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.