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 keyOnly someone with the private key can feasibly

decrypt it Private key is the two large prime numbers Example product of two primes:

35052111338673026690212423937053328511880760811579981620642802346685810623109850235943049080973386241113784040794704193978215378499765413083646438784740952306932534945195080183861574225226218879827232453912820596886440377536082465681750074417459151485407445862511023472235560823053497791518928820272257787786

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

StrataMember 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