BY CLAYTON PETTY Leonard Max Adleman
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:
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 CD4-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