1. BY CLAYTON PETTY Leonard Max Adleman

2. 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

3. 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

4. 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”

5. 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

6. 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