Peter Shor
More info
- Affiliation
- MIT, formerly Bell Labs
- Known for
- Shor's algorithm, quantum error correction
The mathematician who showed in 1994 that a large enough quantum computer would break RSA — launching a whole field that is still waiting for the computer.
Shor was at Bell Labs when he published the algorithm that factors integers and computes discrete logarithms in polynomial time on a quantum computer. That hits both RSA and Diffie-Hellman — essentially all public-key cryptography in use at the time.
A year later he showed how quantum information could be error-corrected, which made it plausible that such machines could actually be built. He has been a professor at MIT since 2003. The post-quantum cryptography being standardised today is, in effect, a thirty-year reply to a single paper.