Leonard Max Adleman was born on December 31, 1945. He is an American computer scientist. He helped create the RSA encryption algorithm and received the 2002 Turing Award for this work. He also started the area of DNA computing and introduced the term computer virus.

Biography

Leonard M. Adleman was born to a Jewish family in California. His family originally moved to the United States from modern-day Belarus, specifically the Minsk area. He grew up in San Francisco and attended the University of California, Berkeley. There, he earned a bachelor's degree in mathematics in 1968 and a doctorate in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science in 1976. He also worked as a math advisor for the movie Sneakers. In 1996, he became a member of the National Academy of Engineering for his work in computer science and secret codes. He is also a member of the National Academy of Sciences.

Adleman is also an amateur boxer and practiced fighting with James Toney.

Discovery

In 1994, his paper titled Molecular Computation of Solutions to Combinatorial Problems described how DNA was used in an experiment to perform calculations. In this work, he solved a problem involving seven nodes in a Hamiltonian Graph, which is a type of complex problem similar to the traveling salesman problem. Although solving a seven-node problem is simple, this paper was the first known example of using DNA to compute an algorithm. DNA computing has been shown to have the potential to solve other large-scale problems that involve many possible solutions. Adleman is widely known as the Father of DNA Computing.

In 2002, he and his research group solved a "nontrivial" problem using DNA computation. They solved a 20-variable SAT problem with more than 1 million possible solutions. They used a method similar to the one Adleman described in his 1994 paper. First, DNA strands were created to represent all possible solutions to the problem. Then, biochemical techniques were used to remove DNA strands that did not match the correct solution. The remaining DNA strands were analyzed, and their nucleotide sequences revealed the correct answers to the problem.

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

In 1984, Fred Cohen wrote a paper titled Experiments with Computer Viruses, in which he credited Adleman with creating the term "computer virus."

As of 2017, Adleman was working on the mathematical theory of Strata. He is a professor of Computer Science at the University of Southern California.

Awards

For his role in creating the RSA encryption system, Adleman, along with Ron Rivest and Adi Shamir, received the 1996 Paris Kanellakis Theory and Practice Award and the 2002 Turing Award, which is often called the Nobel Prize of Computer Science. In 2006, Adleman was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He also became a 2021 ACM Fellow.