Leonard Max Adleman BY CLAYTON PETTY Background Born

Leonard Max Adleman BY CLAYTON PETTY

Background �Born Dec. 31, 1945 in California �Attended UC Berkeley BA in Mathematics in 1968 Ph. D. in EECS in 1976 �Co-inventor of the RSA cryptosystem �Contributed to DNA Computing �Received Turing Award in 2002

RSA and Cryptography �Ron Rivest, Adi Shamir, Leonard Adleman (RSA) Publicly described the algorithm in 1977 Public-key Encryption Used for secure data transmissions �Encrypt a message using a public key �Only someone with the private key can feasibly decrypt it Private key is the two large prime numbers Example product of two primes: � 35052111338673026690212423937053328511880760811579981620642802346685810623109850235943049080973386241113784 04079470419397821537849976541308364643878474095230693253494519508018386157422522621887982723245391282059688 6440377536082465681750074417459151485407445862511023472235560823053497791518928820272257787786

Viruses �Coined the term “Computer Virus” Describes self replicating programs Credited by Adleman’s student, Fred Cohen �Once the 80’s hit, found an interest in Biology Developed a theory of CD 4 -cell depletion in AIDS �Noticed similarity between how polymerase produces complementary strands of DNA and a turning machine Now considered the “Father of DNA Computing”

DNA Computation �Molecular Computation of Solutions To Combinatorial Problems Written in 1994 �Solved an NP-complete 7 -node instance of the Hamiltonian Graph problem Similar to the traveling salesman problem Finding cycles in a graph that visit each node exactly once and �First instance of using DNA as a computational system

Today and Reflection �Professor of Computer Science and Molecular Biology University of Southern California Currently working on the mathematical theory of Strata �Member of the National Academy of Engineering and National Academy of Sciences �Adleman’s work is incredibly interesting RSA is very important today Correlation between Biology and Computer Science is incredible