Prime Numbers Topic For 2004
Boyd-Lubker Visiting Scholar
February 11, 2004
Bowling Green, Ky. - Dr. Carl Pomerance, a leading number theorist, is the 2004 Boyd-Lubker
Visiting Scholar at Western Kentucky University.
Dr. Pomerance will be on campus from Feb. 18-20. His main presentation, "Prime Time: Ancient Prime-Number Problems Meet Online Security," begins at 7 p.m. Feb. 19 in the Mass Media and Technology Hall auditorium.
His presentation will look at how prime numbers (such as 7 and 11 which are exactly divisible by only themselves and 1) have fascinated people for thousands of years and how some basic problems continue to baffle us. One of those unsolved problems, finding a prime that exactly divides a given large number, is the linchpin behind a person's confidence in giving out a credit card number at a website. Prime numbers also are behind schemes to communicate with space aliens.
Dr. Pomerance is professor of mathematics at Dartmouth College and research professor emeritus at the University of Georgia. He received his bachelor's degree from Brown University in 1966 and his doctorate from Harvard University in 1972.
From 1972-99, he was a professor at the University of Georgia, with visiting positions at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, the University of Limoges,
Bell Communications Research, and the Institute for Advanced Study. From 1999-2003, he was a member of technical staff at Bell Laboratories.
Dr. Pomerance specializes in analytic, combinatorial and computational number theory, with applications in the field of cryptology.
He is author of more than 130 published papers and one book and was an invited speaker at the 1994 International Congress of Mathematicians, the Mathematical Association of America Polya Lecturer for 1993-95, and the MAA Hedrick Lecturer in 1999. He has won the Chauvenet Prize (1985), the Haimo Award for Distinguished Teaching in the USA (1997), and the Conant Prize (2001).
For more information, contact Blaine Ferrell at (270) 745-4448. More WKU news is available on the World Wide Web at www.wku.edu. If you'd like to receive WKU news via E-mail, send a message to WKUNews@wku.edu.
