Peter Shor
Peter Williston Shor is an American professor of applied mathematics at MIT. He is known for his work on quantum computation, in particular for devising Shor's algorithm, a quantum algorithm for factoring exponentially faster than the best currently-known algorithm running on a classical computer.Education
While attending Tamalpais High School, in Mill Valley, California, he placed third in the 1977 USA Mathematical Olympiad. After graduating that year, he won a silver medal at the International Math Olympiad in Yugoslavia. He received his B.S. in Mathematics in 1981 for undergraduate work at Caltech, and was a Putnam Fellow in 1978. He earned his Ph.D. in Applied Mathematics from MIT in 1985. His doctoral advisor was F. Thomson Leighton, and his thesis was on probabilistic analysis of bin-packing algorithms.Career
After graduating, he spent one year as a postdoctoral researcher at the University of California, Berkeley, and then accepted a position at Bell Laboratories. It was there he developed Shor's algorithm, for which he was awarded the Nevanlinna Prize at the 23rd International Congress of Mathematicians in 1998 and the Gödel Prize in 1999. In 1999 he was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship. In 2017 he received the Dirac Medal of the ICTP and for 2019 the BBVA Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge Award in Basic Sciences.
Shor began his MIT position in 2003. Currently the Henry Adams Morss and Henry Adams Morss, Jr. Professor of Applied Mathematics in the Department of Mathematics at MIT, he also is affiliated with CSAIL and the Center for Theoretical Physics.
He received a Distinguished Alumni Award from Caltech in 2007.
On October 1, 2011, he was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He was elected as an ACM Fellow in 2019 "for contributions to quantum computing, information theory, and randomized algorithms".
