Leonard Adleman

Leonard Max Adleman is an American computer scientist, mathematician, cryptographer, and molecular biologist born in San Francisco in 1945. He has been employed by the University of Southern California and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. His field of work includes cryptography, and he is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the National Academy of Engineering, and the Association for Computing Machinery.

Adleman received the Turing Award and the Paris Kanellakis Award, and he is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the ACM. His notable works include the Adleman–Pomerance–Rumely primality test and DNA computing. He earned his doctorate under advisor Manuel Blum and has Fred Cohen as a doctoral student. He also holds an Erdős number of 2.