Carl Bernard Pomerance is a well-known number theorist

Number theory

Number theory is a branch of pure mathematics devoted primarily to the study of the integers. Number theorists study prime numbers as well...

. He attended college at Brown University

Brown University

Brown University is a private, Ivy League university located in Providence, Rhode Island, United States. Founded in 1764 prior to American independence from the British Empire as the College in the English Colony of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations early in the reign of King George III ,...

 and later received his Ph.D.

Ph.D.

A Ph.D. is a Doctor of Philosophy, an academic degree.Ph.D. may also refer to:* Ph.D. , a 1980s British group*Piled Higher and Deeper, a web comic strip*PhD: Phantasy Degree, a Korean comic series* PhD Docbook renderer, an XML renderer...

 from Harvard University

Harvard University

Harvard University is a private Ivy League university located in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States, established in 1636 by the Massachusetts legislature. Harvard is the oldest institution of higher learning in the United States and the first corporation chartered in the country...

 in 1972 with a dissertation proving that any odd perfect number

Perfect number

In number theory, a perfect number is a positive integer that is equal to the sum of its proper positive divisors, that is, the sum of its positive divisors excluding the number itself . Equivalently, a perfect number is a number that is half the sum of all of its positive divisors i.e...

 has at least 7 distinct prime factor

Prime factor

In number theory, the prime factors of a positive integer are the prime numbers that divide that integer exactly, without leaving a remainder. The process of finding these numbers is called integer factorization, or prime factorization. A prime factor can be visualized by understanding Euclid's...

s. He immediately joined the faculty at the University of Georgia

University of Georgia

The University of Georgia is a public research university located in Athens, Georgia, United States. Founded in 1785, it is the oldest and largest of the state's institutions of higher learning and is one of multiple schools to claim the title of the oldest public university in the United States...

, becoming full professor in 1982. He subsequently worked at Lucent Technologies

Lucent Technologies

Alcatel-Lucent USA, Inc., originally Lucent Technologies, Inc. is a French-owned technology company composed of what was formerly AT&T Technologies, which included Western Electric and Bell Labs...

 for a number of years, and then became a distinguished Professor at Dartmouth College

Dartmouth College

Dartmouth College is a private, Ivy League university in Hanover, New Hampshire, United States. The institution comprises a liberal arts college, Dartmouth Medical School, Thayer School of Engineering, and the Tuck School of Business, as well as 19 graduate programs in the arts and sciences...

.

He has won many teaching and research awards, including the Chauvenet Prize

Chauvenet Prize

The Chauvenet Prize is the highest award for mathematical expository writing. It consists of a prize of $1,000 and a certificate, and is awarded yearly by the Mathematical Association of America in recognition of an outstanding expository article on a mathematical topic. The prize is named in...

 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

Richard Crandall

Richard E. Crandall is an American Physicist and computer scientist who has made contributions to computational number theory.He is most notable for the development of the irrational base discrete weighted transform, an important method of finding very large primes. He has, at various times, been...

 of Prime numbers: a computational perspective, Springer-Verlag

Springer Science+Business Media

- Selected publications :* Encyclopaedia of Mathematics* Ergebnisse der Mathematik und ihrer Grenzgebiete * Graduate Texts in Mathematics * Grothendieck's Séminaire de géométrie algébrique...

, 2001, 2005. He is the inventor of one of the most important integer factorization

Integer factorization

In number theory, integer factorization or prime factorization is the decomposition of a composite number into smaller non-trivial divisors, which when multiplied together equal the original integer....

 methods, the quadratic sieve

Quadratic sieve

The quadratic sieve algorithm is a modern integer factorization algorithm and, in practice, the second fastest method known . It is still the fastest for integers under 100 decimal digits or so, and is considerably simpler than the number field sieve...

 algorithm, which was used in 1994 for the factorization of RSA-129. He is also one of the discoverers of the Adleman-Pomerance-Rumely primality test.

His Erdős number

Erdos number

The Erdős number describes the "collaborative distance" between a person and mathematician Paul Erdős, as measured by authorship of mathematical papers.The same principle has been proposed for other eminent persons in other fields.- Overview :...

 is 1.

External links

• Home page
• 2001 Conant Prize, an article in the Bulletin of the AMS
  Bulletin of the American Mathematical Society
  The Bulletin of the American Mathematical Society is a quarterly mathematical journal published by the American Mathematical Society...
  
  , vol 48:4 (2001), 418-419.