Mathematician, cryptographer

Neal I. Koblitz (born December 24, 1948) is a Professor of Mathematics at the University of Washington. He is also an adjunct professor with the Centre for Applied Cryptographic Research at the University of Waterloo. He is the creator of hyperelliptic curve cryptography and the independent co-creator of elliptic curve cryptography.

Contents

• 1 Biography
• 2 See also
• 3 Selected publications
• 4 References
• 5 External links

Biography

Koblitz received his undergraduate degree from Harvard University in 1969. While at Harvard, he was a Putnam Fellow in 1968. He received his Ph.D. from Princeton University in 1974 under the direction of Nick Katz. From 1975 to 1979 he was an instructor at Harvard University. In 1979 he began working at the University of Washington.

Koblitz's 1981 article "Mathematics as Propaganda" criticized the misuse of mathematics in the social sciences and helped motivate Serge Lang's successful challenge to the nomination of political scientist Samuel P. Huntington to the National Academy of Sciences. In The Mathematical Intelligencer, Koblitz, Steven Weintraub, and Saunders Mac Lane later criticized the arguments of Herbert A. Simon, who had attempted to defend Huntington's work.

He co-invented Elliptic-curve cryptography in 1985, with Victor S. Miller and for this was awarded the Levchin Prize in 2021.

With his wife Ann Hibner Koblitz, he in 1985 founded the Kovalevskaia Prize, to honour women scientists in developing countries. It was financed from the royalties of Ann Hibner Koblitz's 1983 biography of Sofia Kovalevskaia. Although the awardees have ranged over many fields of science, one of the 2011 winners was a Vietnamese mathematician, Lê Thị Thanh Nhàn. Koblitz is an atheist.

See also

• List of University of Waterloo people
• Gross–Koblitz formula

Selected publications

• p-adic Numbers, p-adic *ysis, and Zeta-Functions, Graduate Texts in Mathematics No. 58, Springer-Verlag, New York, 1977. Second edition, 1984.
• p-adic *ysis: A Short Course on Recent Work, London Mathematical Society Lecture Note Series No. 46, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1980.
• Introduction to Elliptic Curves and Modular Forms, Graduate Texts in Math. No. 97, Springer-Verlag, New York, 1984. Second edition, 1993.
• A Course in Number Theory and Cryptography, Graduate Texts in Math. No. 114, Springer-Verlag, New York, 1987. Second edition, 1994.
• Algebraic Aspects of Cryptography, Algorithms and Computation in Mathematics Vol. 3, Springer-Verlag, New York, 1998.
• Random Curves: Journeys of a Mathematician, his autobiography. Springer-Verlag, 2007.

References

External links

• Neal Koblitz's home page
• Neal Koblitz at the Mathematics Genealogy Project