Carl Pomerance

Carl Pomerance (born in 1944 in Joplin, Missouri) is a well known number theorist. He attended college at Brown University and later received his Ph.D. from Harvard University in 1972 with a dissertation proving that any odd perfect number N has at least 7 distinct prime factors. He immediately joined the faculty at the University of Georgia, becoming full professor in 1982. He subsequently worked at Lucent Technologies for a number of years, and then became a Distinguished Professor at Dartmouth College.

He has won many teaching and research awards, including the Chauvenet Prize in 1985, MAA's distinguished university teaching award in 1997, and the Conant Prize in 2001. He has over 120 publications to his credit, including co-authorship with Richard Crandall of Prime numbers: a computational perspective, Springer-Verlag, 2001, 2005. He is the inventor of one of the most important factorisation methods, the quadratic sieve algorithm, which was used in 1994 for the factorisation of RSA-129. He is also one of the discoverers of the Adleman-Pomerance-Rumely primality test.

His Erdős number is 1.

External links

• Home page
• 2001 Conant Prize, an article in the Bulletin of the AMS, vol 48:4 (2001), 418-419.