Kevin McCurley (cryptographer)

Kevin Snow McCurley[1] is a mathematician, computer scientist, and cryptographer, and a former[2] research scientist at Google. He has written publications about information retrieval, algorithms, parallel computing, cryptography, and number theory.[3]

Kevin McCurley
Alma materUniversity of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Years active1981-present?
Known forStudying number theory and cryptography, working at Google
Websitehttps://www.mccurley.org

Early life and education

When he was a child, McCurley had built model planes and cars, and he enjoyed making things with his hands.[3]

McCurley attended a high school in San Jose, California. There, one of his teachers, Judy Jones, showed him that "mathematics really could be fun and interesting" and encouraged him to attend mathematical contests.[3]

In his first year at Santa Clara University, McCurley had Jerry Anderson, a former president of the MAA, as his professor in calculus; Anderson told "interesting stories" and was able to "relate the mathematics to history and to activities that were meaningful".[3] He started out as a mathematician, but he later retrained himself as a computer scientist.[3][4]

In 1981, McCurley received his Ph.D. in mathematics from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.[1] His dissertation in analytic number theory was titled Explicit Estimates for Functions of Primes in Arithmetic Progressions, and his advisor was Paul Trevier Bateman.[3][1] He also received a master's in statistics there.[3]

In the fall of 1995, McCurley taught an undergraduate course on cryptology at the University of New Mexico.[5][6]

After he was a post-doc at Michigan State University, McCurley took a job at USC (Los Angeles), where he published some papers with Leonard Adleman about algorithms and complexity.[3]

Career

Before 2005, McCurley worked at IBM Almaden Research Center, Sandia National Laboratories, and at the University of Southern California.[3] McCurley worked in a cryptography group at Sandia National Laboratories, where he worked on applying number theory to cryptography and parallel computing.[3] He then worked at IBM Research in California on digital rights management, where he wrote a few patents;[3] he was there in January 1999.[7]

A former president of the International Association for Cryptologic Research, McCurley was selected as an IACR Fellow in 2005 for his "exemplary service as IACR President and essential leadership in IACR information systems".[8]

From 2005 to at least 2009 McCurley was a research scientist at Google Research.[3] There, he worked on search, advertisements, and Android.[3]

Miscellany

In 2000, McCurley suggested, while speaking at Financial Cryptography '00 conference, that, as a countermeasure against email spam, recipients of email from unknown senders should request that the message include a first name, a few dollars, or a donation to a specific charity as compensation. He also suggested that this be formalized in an open standard.[9]

Bets about P vs NP

McCurley has made three bets with Ron Fagin about the outcome of the P versus NP problem. In each bet, the outcome P = NP would require Fagin to pay McCurley $50, whereas P != NP would require McCurley to pay Fagin $10. The first bet had a deadline of 31 December 2010, the second a deadline of 31 December 2020, and the third (made in 2021) a deadline of 31 December 2030.[10]

References
  1. Kevin McCurley at the Mathematics Genealogy Project
  2. "Kevin McCurley". mccurley.org. Archived from the original on 16 August 2021. Retrieved 12 June 2021.
  3. "An Interview with Google's Kevin McCurley | Mathematical Association of America". www.maa.org. 3 December 2009. Archived from the original on 17 October 2015. Retrieved 3 June 2021.
  4. McCurley, Kevin. "Kevin McCurley". pages.swcp.com. Archived from the original on 25 December 2008. Retrieved 2 December 2021.
  5. "Modern Cryptology Links". www-math.ucdenver.edu. Archived from the original on 4 July 2010. Retrieved 3 June 2021.
  6. "CS 431 - Cryptology in Computing". pages.swcp.com. Archived from the original on 24 March 2009. Retrieved 3 June 2021.
  7. Mills, Elinor (January 21, 1999). "CNN - Congress considers easing cryptography rules". www.cnn.com. Archived from the original on 23 April 2000. Retrieved 3 June 2021.
  8. "IACR Fellow citation". Iacr.org. Archived from the original on 20 June 2006. Retrieved 2013-01-31.
  9. "Send Out Spam, Pay the Bill". Wired. 23 February 2000. ISSN 1059-1028. Retrieved 3 June 2021.
  10. "Wanna bet on P=NP?". pages.swcp.com. Archived from the original on 29 June 2020. Retrieved 3 June 2021.
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