Carl Pomerance

Speaker: Carl Pomerance, Bell Labs

Date and time: Friday, 6 September 2002 at 3:00 PM.

Place: Fielding Room, 3rd floor Howe Center

Title: What's new in primality testing?

Abstract

I describe the new deterministic, polynomial time primality test of Agrawal, Kayal, and Saxena.

Biography

Carl Pomerance is one of the world's top number theorists. He received his PhD from Harvard University (under John Tate) in 1972. After graduating, he immediately joined the faculty at the University of Georgia, becoming full professor in 1982. He is now with Bell Labs, at Lucent. He has won many teaching and research awards, including the Chauvenet Prize in 1985, MAA's distinguished university teaching award in 1997, and the AMS's Conant Prize in 2001. He has over 120 publications, and is the author (with R. Crandell) of "Prime numbers: a computational perspective", Springer-Verlag, 2001. He is also the inventor of one of the most important factorization methods - the quadratic sieve.